ALBUM REVIEW · WILD PINK
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 read
4/5 · STRONG — THE JOLT VERDICT: The rock record they kept threatening to make. Play it loud.
Wild 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 the speed is audible in the best way. Nine songs, thirty-three minutes, takes that sound like a band in a room rather than 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. Farrar records the loud parts dry and close, so when “Box Store” bursts open inside three minutes the room gets bigger, not blurrier.
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 are the flaws of momentum. The back third settles into one tempo and stays there. “Simple” is exactly what its title admits, 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, and it was worth the threat.
This song isn’t about any one single thing, but it’s mostly about my son and feeling overwhelming love.
— JOHN ROSS, ON THE TITLE TRACK
The tracklist
- Box Store — 2:39
- Round Of Applause At The End Of The World — 4:28
- Still Coming Down — 3:48
- Plates Keep Spinning — 3:42
- Like Water — 3:45
- Simple — 3:20
- Dead For A Sec — 3:49
- 500 Is The New 250 — 4:05
- Relaxing, Special Interests — 3:22