Still Coming Down: the loud one lands
Cut in a week in Asheville with half the Wednesday family in the room, Wild Pink’s sixth is their warmest and heaviest at once.
BY JOLT Staff · AUG 21 2026 · 3 min readWild Pink used to hide their rock songs under weather. Six albums in, John Ross has stopped hiding. Still Coming Down was cut in one week at Drop of Sun in Asheville with Alex Farrar producing, two years after Dulling the Horns, and you can hear the speed. Nine songs, thirty-three minutes, takes that sound like a band playing together, not like a plan for one.
The guest list maps the room. MJ Lenderman adds guitar. Meg Duffy of Hand Habits plays fretless lines that move through the title track like slow water, next to Landon George’s fiddle, while Wednesday’s Xandy Chelmis handles pedal steel. None of it is decoration, and Farrar records the loud parts dry and close, so when “Box Store” bursts open inside three minutes the room gets bigger, not blurrier.
“This song isn’t about any one single thing, but it’s mostly about my son and feeling overwhelming love.”
Ross has reasons for the warmth. He fought cancer through the ILYSM years, then became a father, and the songs carry both without asking for credit. His America is still the strange one, box stores and Kennedy trivia and highway light, but he writes it now like someone glad to be driving through it.
The flaws come from momentum. The back third settles into one tempo and stays there. “Simple” is as plain as its name, and Ross’s melodies, always more contour than hook, can slide past before you catch one. “Round of Applause at the End of the World” fixes that on its own: the year’s best song about applauding the collapse.
Play it loud, in order, once a day. The rock record they kept threatening finally landed.
