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.

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."

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.”

Across the album, and on it's mission statement of an opener, you can hear him rediscovering the fire in real time, and the result is something that recalls an earlier iteration of Wild Pink's sound while carrying with it the lessons of their more recent output. Bigger and fuzzier than Yolk In The Fur, more direct and driving than ILYSM, and featuring some of Ross' best songwriting moments to date, "The Fences of Stonehenge" is an exciting preview of Wild Pink's next phase.

Ross says of the song:

"I was messing around with some classic sounding lyrical tropes because I wanted to pick them apart as a song idea but also because they actually sounded good as lyrics. I think it works because this song is kind of about figuring out what to do when you realize you outgrew a lot of stuff you used to like. This song came together somewhat quickly and I was pretty sure it was gonna be the album opener when I was writing it."