“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.
Today, Ross is sharing the first preview of this new Wild Pink chapter, announcing Dulling The Horns, which will be out October 4th on Fire Talk Records, and sharing the aforementioned lead off track “The Fences of Stonehenge.”
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