Thursday, January 29, 2026 at 8:00 PM EDT

Wild Pink

“Do you still believe it?” John Ross asks that question after journeying through the wreckage, after singing of thunder rolling down the track and lighting in a bottle. These are tropes, and he knows it. It’s a moment where he’s returning to the ancient wisdom of his classic rock forebears, trying to find the answers all over again. This is the ground Ross travels in “The Fences Of Stonehenge,” the lead single, opening track, and mission statement of the new Wild Pink album Dulling The Horns. The question reverberates across the album: “Do you still believe it?” And what happens when you don’t anymore?

Ross’ response is to start anew. From the late ‘10s through the early ‘20s, Wild Pink was on the classic ascension arc. The otherworldly synth-Americana of 2018’s Yolk In The Fur garnered them press buzz and accolades, while the widescreen gloss and scope of its followup, 2021’s A Billion Little Lights, swung for the fences at the cusp of the band’s breakthrough. Then everything changed: Ross received a shocking cancer diagnosis. Wild Pink’s subsequent release, 2022’s ILYSM, was inevitably saddled with the weight of being an album about mortality and love. On the other side of it all, Ross began to reimagine what Wild Pink was.

The genesis of Dulling The Horns goes back to late 2022, when Ross began workshopping new material during soundcheck on the ILYSM tour. Last summer, Wild Pink decamped to western Massachusetts to reunite with engineer Justin Pizzoferrato. Ross decided to record Dulling The Horns live in the room, in an effort to capture Wild Pink’s onstage style — rawer, grainier. Gone are the glimmering atmospherics and studio affectations of recent Wild Pink outings. Instead, Ross’ voice is haggard against the humid distortion coating every song. “I didn’t want to clean up anymore,” he says. “In doing so we’ve arrived at a new place.”

After the “digital lacquer” of A Billion Little Lights, Ross had already wanted ILYSM to be more organic and human. But Dulling The Horns takes that prompt further in every way. There will still be occasional synth plinks, sax drones, pedal steel courtesy of frequent collaborator Mike “Slo Mo” Brenner, and even a bit of fiddle. But otherwise, Dulling The Horns is coarse, lived-in, visceral — music intended to be played live, with pounding rhythms and guitars bleeding all over. “I wanted to make economical songs,” Ross explains. “Music that is very much at its core three or four people rocking.” If before, Wild Pink took notes from Springsteen and Petty, they’ve now entered their Crazy Horse era.

Dulling The Horns is the sound of Wild Pink fraying at the edges. On the other side of his cancer battle and having to retell the story through an album cycle, he found himself exhausted — desperate for a new spark, a new story. “You zoom out, and I’m very fortunate,” he continues. “But Dulling The Horns came from the feeling of figuring out how do you deal with things and move forward and just keep creating.”

There’s a paradox at the core of the album: You can hear the toll the years took on Ross, but his new music sounds like a vital reclamation. Accordingly, the album’s overall mood conflicts with itself, too. Ross picked the phrase “dulling the horns” to refer to when a wild animal’s horns get worn down and thinking about the treadmill of the music industry. But now as Ross has also become a father, aging has meant wear and tear as well as those new joys.

But before you foist the parenthood album on Ross after his cancer album, Dulling The Horns is more a rangey, unruly eruption than the pristine epics of previous Wild Pink albums. Far from staid domestication or venturing out to pasture, Ross’s latest collection is wooly and wild with ideas. Throughout, his lyrics mirror the music in its scrappiness. Some connect, some are ellipses; some resonate poignantly and some tumble into hilarious asides. With Dulling The Horns as Wild Pink’s reset, it’s as if Ross is emptying all this loose, untamed energy both musically and spiritually.

That means “Eating The Egg Whole” rides a chugging road ramble of a beat while Ross muses on Michael Jordan documentaries and DC sports history, slyly connecting local vicissitudes to mortality with one raspy “Nothing lasts forever!” “Sprinter Brain” takes its name for a band in-joke — about one particularly stressful sprinter van tour that plagued Ross — but cloaks one of the album’s most touching stories as Ross juxtaposes his anxiety against his wife’s solidarity. Tiny moments of personal revelation sit right alongside a mesmerizing mess of disparate asides and themes. Take “Catholic Dracula,” a song in which Ross sings about how Dracula was, in fact, once a Catholic, before asking: “And I wonder what he thought about/ All that imagery of suffering/ The execution on the giant wooden pole/ And how it must have inspired his later work.” The songs work almost as collage vignettes, Ross rattling himself out of ennui with loud, emphatic music chasing whichever thread his frazzled mind thought might lead somewhere surprising.

But in the end, he finds his way back to something like home. Dulling The Horns’ was almost named for its closer, “Rung Cold,” the first song Ross began working on for the album. Instead, it becomes the final word, one last avalanche of modern day overstimulation and overdosing on cappuccins and Czech news on a TV in a bank before, finally, Ross concludes: “And if you can’t get along with it/ You gotta just get on with it.” Perhaps it’s a fittingly world-weary sentiment, an unsteady resolution for the ineffable “it” Ross was still trying to believe in at the beginning of the album. On Dulling The Horns, you can hear him rediscovering the fire in real time. Tropes discarded along the roadside, songs pulled from the formative DNA of rock music, all filtered through years of messy fog. “There is no answer to these problems,” Ross says, having eventually yielded. But as far Dulling The Horns is concerned, there’s at least one path forward: Burn it all away, and keep moving.

Dead Gowns

How does one cope with the pang of desire? It’s the tender, sometimes volatile question that confronts and transforms Geneviève Beaudoin on her debut full-length as Dead Gowns, It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow. With a yowl, a whisper, or a candid, conversational affect, Beaudoin’s potent melodies and moody, varied arrangements invoke a story of dissatisfaction, intimacy, and transition throughout the record’s twelve songs.

A deft lyricist with a sweeping range of poetic color and texture, Beaudoin paints her story in dark romantics. She presents a woman in the high summer of adulthood deciphering life’s capacity to fulfill desires or let them go painfully unmet. These cravings – to be touched, to be known, to have just one more encounter with someone lost to time – are a lacuna that Beaudoin prods at with the curiosity of an artist only satiated by the full expression of a feeling.

Tracking for It’s Summer,... began in the early years of the pandemic, coming together across a patchwork of sessions that spread out over the following years as the band also recorded, released, and toured the 2022 EP How (and its 2023 Vinyl Me, Please extended edition). In the album’s final form, we find the unique sounds of the Maine locales that hosted those sessions – a desacralized church on coastal Deer Isle, an old gymnasium on Peaks Island, and various home studios – and the hands who shaped the record, including Beaudoin’s longtime collaborator and co-producer Luke Kalloch and a tight circle of East Coast instrumentalists.

Though never named outright, Beaudoin’s home in Maine – and its ragged, granite-strewn coastline – is an evocative character inhabiting the album, a force even more implacable than Beaudoin’s emotions. Also present is the acute awareness of time passing – the album swelters between seasons, taking the proverbial sweater on and off as the months change and experiences, relationships, and versions of Beaudoin bloom and wither.

The first season of It’s Summer,... opens with the question, “How Can I?” where hand-plucked, meandering guitar voicings widen into a vast, vernal landscape. Punctuated by percussion and an urgent wall of electricity and guitars, Beaudoin dredges through the mud, withholding truth from a loved one and feeling the relationship rot in turn. On the second track, “Wet Dog,” there’s a marked change as Beaudoin fervently pursues what she wants, careening through the feeling like “a horse cut from the carousel” while a walking groove simmers with the loose tinge of psych rock.

“There’s a sense of freedom by starting in an autobiographical place and then expanding into fiction,” Beaudoin says of her approach to writing about lived experiences. “I learn so much about what has happened by exploring what could have been.” On side B cut “Swimmer,” the track opens with a phone call between two people transformed by time and memory, who later are “burning indigo” on a rocky beach. “It’s raining and they’re like dogs,” Beaudoin says of those hopeless lovers. But as her lyrics reveal, the scene on the beach never happens because the phone call never went through. “While many of these songs can read like scenes between two characters, it’s ultimately one-sided visions,” she said.

Autumn arrives as the record progresses, and Beaudoin’s perspective on desire matures, expanding outside the boundaries of romantic love to a more nuanced perspective on family and community. In “Brother,” there is a sleepy, breezy call for reconciliation that stings with the feeling of estrangement, while in “Burnout,” Beaudoin quietly reflects on her maternal lineage. Tempering regret with nostalgia, she recalls idyllic summers spent and perhaps squandered in youthful preoccupation in the urgently paced “Kid 1.” “I want to feed stale bread to swans / when love was a daydream in her lawn,” sings Beaudoin over a spacious arrangement of loose, airy drums and the grassy swells of guitars. The response in “Kid 2” is a distanced reverie, a sun-soaked dream recorded during a December snowstorm, a stark juxtaposition captured in Beaudoin’s gripping vocals over a cold, dampened piano accompaniment.

As if you’re watching a photographer change a lens, you can feel Beaudoin widen the scope of her introspection as time passes. She candidly maneuvers through the isolation of chronic illness and loneliness and reveals another part of herself on the tender, languorous “See People,” inflected with pedal steel and the swooning, cutting admission “I need to see people / I live on my phone.” Then there’s the assured edge of “Bad Habit” and “Maladie,” where Beaudoin tries to stave off preoccupation by creating distance. Even still, her desires are never assuaged; they burn under the surface with a thinly veiled intensity. As Beaudoin cries at the upper reaches of her brightest register, “You know what I want / and I can’t have it / it’s a bad habit,” her desire revealed again after an attempt to conceal it.

There’s an uncanny well of power behind her willingness to inspect, reveal, and, at times, submit to her desire. The record is a stirring compilation of raw, passionate folk-rock that calls to mind the music of Cat Power, PJ Harvey, and Big Thief. Pulled from a segment of Eileen Miles’ poem, ‘Shhh,’ the album’s title, It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow, evokes a feeling of disorientation and the inevitability of change. External and internal forces charge Beaudoin, her inner world shifting much like the dizzying change of the seasons. “We get swept up in the blizzard, and then we are set down in the hot salty haze of August,” she says, remembering the Maine winters of her childhood.

While we can’t change the weather, we can soften the blow of change, and Beaudoin resolves the record with the sparse, warm sprawl of “Sand Plumb.” Inviting breath and reflection, she asks, “How do I become the water?” –  revealing a desire to dissolve and flow freely through the seasons, the months, the years. In the hum of a solitary electric guitar, Beaudoin holds her longing in the balance, no longer overcome but embodied. By its end, the album resembles the coastal pull of Beaudoin’s childhood. These songs will pick you up and put you down again, transformed, raw, and satiated.

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