John Ross knows a thing or two about self-deception. The songwriter and frontman of Wild Pink fills Still Coming Down, the latest from the shapeshifting New York indie group, with stories of men who have cooked their brains and lost their souls, without gaining much in the bargain. They rob banks, fall down internet rabbit holes, go to bars to bet alone on their phones. They tell themselves stories, but they don't really believe them. "Your brain is very kind to make you think you're warm inside," one man allows, but even he knows it's a ruse: "You're so cold, you're dying."
These are all-American losers, too hopeless to hate, but without much going for them all the same, and Ross is their bard. Wry and ironic, with a wide-ranging mind and just a smidge of compassion, his songs have the ring of a confession made by someone who does not really want to be forgiven. "How much of God's love can you take day-in and day-out?" he asks on "Plates Keep Spinning," the story of a man who fears waking back up in the afterlife and having to keep on with the same old shit. His narrators are exhausted, resigned to lives they've slumped into and lack the will (or the energy) to change. "Thought it was something, turns out it's nothing," he sings on "Dead for a Sec," a lifetime condensed into a single exhale. "I still don't really understand where the time went."
Ross might understand these men, but he's hardly a slacker. With Wild Pink he has put out six albums in the last nine years, not to mention plenty of EPs and standalone singles. Restless and ambitious, he has pushed the band's sound from dreamy bedroom pop through War On Drugs–style space rock and on into wall-of-sound opus territory. This approach hasn't always worked out—2022's self-produced ILYSM has some luminous songs, but never finds a center—but it's been exciting to follow, and has produced a diverse and surprising body of work. As Ross put it on 2024's "Eating the Egg Whole": "My stupid ass is always searching." Well damn, mine too.
That song, like the rest of Dulling the Horns, was recorded live on the studio floor, producing a bright, fuzzy sound that continues with Still Coming Down. Indie impresario Alex Farrar has produced a scuzzy, guitar-forward mix, a mid-fi aesthetic that gives every instrument, from the drums to Ross's voice, a distorted sandpaper edge. After years spent singing in a soft high register, Ross has brought his voice down an octave, matching the band's roughed-up roar with a newfound vocal punch—a twangy smart-ass tone that pokes and prods at his subjects, but never sneers. So too the band's movement from spacey, prog-rock soundscapes to something much closer to a high-end bar band, a palette filled with banjos, accordions, and swooping, swooning pedal-steel lines courtesy of Wednesday's Xandy Chelmis.
He's not the only (one-time) member of the Asheville alt-country superstars to play on Still Coming Down. MJ Lenderman, of "houseboat docked at the himbodome" fame, helps out on the chorus of late-album stand-out "Dead for a Sec," harmonizing on vocals and ripping a searching Crazy Horse solo over the song's backbeat outro. The collaboration makes sense: Wild Pink opened for him last year, and Still Coming Down is their deliberate stab at an alt-country album. The genre is both conceptual (country-style music made outside the Nashville machine) and sonic: punk-rock textures applied to the twang-heavy sounds of American folk music. It's also kind of made-up, encompassing the grunge devotees in Wednesday, David Berman's all-American smart-assery, and the psychedelic rave-ups of Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse band. But you know it when you hear it, and I sure hear it all over Still Coming Down.
I could attempt a history here, but I would inevitably leave someone out, and the guys at No Depression would be so pissed with me. Safe to say that Americans have been combining country and rock since Elvis crossed over, but as far as we're concerned the really good stuff started popping up in the early '80s, when L.A. groups like X and Lone Justice began mixing hiccuping rockabilly rhythms into their West Coast punk rock. Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy formed Uncle Tupelo in their teens, marrying their love of the Alan Lomax songbook to a stop-start hardcore sensibility on the four classic albums they released in four straight years.
Tweedy would become a Chicago staple, and the city has turned out so many great alt-country acts—Souled American, Robbie Fulks, Freakwater—it spawned a major label feeding frenzy, and a number of local labels (Drag City, Bloodshot) still pick up the slack. Jason Molina's music ran the gamut from bluegrass to ambient post-rock, but when he wanted to make his country-rock opus The Magnolia Electric Co., he stayed at home in Chicago. When the Mekons traded Brit-punk for American roots music, they moved there too.
The scene might have dimmed a bit from its late-'90s high, but there are probably more good bands making their own spin on alt-country today than at any time since. Possibly my favorite album of the year was made by Ratboys, a Chicago group that rides the line between Americana and wide-open indie rock. Singin' to an Empty Chair is a work of craft and patience, pairing stories of guilt and heartbreak to the kind of brightly chiming guitars found on early Death Cab for Cutie records. Yet alongside producer and former Death Cabbie Chris Walla, songs like "Penny in the Lake" and "The World, So Madly" choogle and groove with the best of them. Put it on for a particularly introspective barbecue.
2026 has actually been a great year for fans of alt-country, and the diversity of acts shows how capacious the term has always been. The '90s survivors in Lambchop and Souled American both put out quiet, choral records that rely on the absolute rudiments—acoustics, words, the bare human voice—to fill themselves out. Two young groups, Mildred and Villagerrr, took a similarly spacey tact, augmenting their folk-rock tunes with droning woodwinds and hazy shoegaze harmonies. The 112-track chip-tune breakdown self-released by the folx collective back in February might seem to share very little with the jangly New Orleans songwriter Thomas Dollbaum, but both are grappling with the history and iconography of American roots music—they just come to very different conclusions.
I have come to especially love Companion, from the North Carolina band Sluice. Equally indebted to Steven Malkmus and Thomas Merton, Justin Morris and friends find space around his simple, sturdy melodies for organ washes, fiddle solos, and unearthly vocoder drones. It's patient music, rarely explosive, yet with a wry, lacerating bite at odds with Morris's laconic delivery. Like a post-doc working retail, he's not showing any effort, but he's dead serious all the same.
Wild Pink have often orbited around this world, touring with legendary lap-steel player Mike "Slo Mo" Brennan and adding lush western touches to 2021's A Billion Little Lights. But it is easy to playact man of the woods, much harder to do anything with that sound. I've often thought that Wednesday excels at the alt- side of the equation, while the -country can sometimes feel like a put-on, the equivalent of a camo hunting hat in a Park Slope coffee shop. At times it sounds like the New York–based Ross is affecting a semi-southern accent in order to get a bit closer to the Floridian dirtbags he's singing about.
This isn’t necessarily a problem; Ross hasn't found the best fit between his voice and his music, and Still Coming Down might be the closest he's gotten yet. It helps that he hasn't completely surrendered to the pervading aesthetic, injecting his woozy tunes with prog-rock organ solos and looping backbeats. His referential range remains vast, bringing together Sirhan Sirhan, Moneyball, and the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. It's still a Wild Pink album, in other words, but it's the first I can imagine blasting on a bleary summer night, maybe while crushing a cold beer. Ross might not be fooling anyone, but unlike with characters, there's no need to. Still Coming Down is the real deal.
