Still Coming Down

Wild Pink — 2026

“Still Coming Down finds Wild Pink sounding looser, louder, and more comfortable than ever, with John Ross writing some of his sharpest stories yet.”

John Ross has been running Wild Pink for the better part of a decade, and Still Coming Down is the sixth record where he sounds like he has stopped worrying about anything else and simply enjoyed making music. He beat cancer and became a father in the years before making it, and you can hear that shift in how little the album strains for meaning. The band cut the whole thing in a single week at Drop of Sun in Asheville with Alex Farrar, tracking vocals in a couple of quick bursts rather than laboring over them, and the looseness pays off. I really like how physical this Wild Pink album sounds, with the wear of life written all over its sleeve. The guitars sit bigger and closer to the red, and Ross has said he went back to the grunge records he loved as a teenager, which tracks the second opener “Box Store” comes rolling in on one ringing strum. Longtime fans should not fret, though. Still Coming Down still lands somewhere between rock and Americana, timeless in a way that feels earned without really becoming classic rock.

Like previous Wild Pink records, the writing will keep you coming back. Ross builds these songs like short stories, packing them with drifters, NFL bros, and movies he only half remembers, with Heat, Moneyball, and The Town all flickering past. He has a gift for the funny, specific detail that lands like a punchline before it breaks your heart. “Still Coming Down” is the softest turn, a sauntering thing carried by Meg Duffy’s fretless guitar and Landon George’s fiddle, written for his son and the blinding weight of new love. Then “500 Is The New 250” lurches the other way into scuzz and distortion, trailing a guy who drives his Cybertruck to a bar called Hard Luck to bet on his phone and drink alone. The line, “The Steelers are in Baltimore tonight / I got no dog though, I got no fight,” is Ross’s lyrical wordplay at its best. The record is an easy grower, and it tightens its grip every time you come back.