Wild Pink Turn Up the Guitars on Dulling the Horns
The New York band’s fifth LP is more visceral and direct on songs that show John Ross’s lyrical idiosyncrasies to their full advantage.

John Ross hasn’t been hiding, exactly, but the Wild Pink mastermind has often taken cover behind music that evokes other music. He’s an inspired enough writer that his personality has tended to show through anyway, though there was always a sense that we weren’t getting the full picture of what Ross could do. Wild Pink’s latest album clears that up.
Dulling the Horns is the band’s most distinctive release so far. It is beholden neither to the hushed piano arrangements and whispery vocals of 2022’s ILYSM, which Ross finished writing after he was diagnosed with cancer (he has since recovered), nor to the lush, indie-adult alternative sound of 2021’s A Billion Little Lights. If there’s an antecedent in the band’s catalog, it’s Wild Pink’s self-titled first album, from 2017—but more visceral and direct this time around. Dulling the Horns is a guitar record, though it’s not one that relies on riffs. Rather, the group’s fifth full-length is brimming with immense growling textures that ebb and flow, creating space in the songs as often as they fill it. That approach seems to have emboldened Ross to let his lyrical idiosyncrasies loose. He’s droll here, and sometimes offhandedly profound as he comes at the stories and sentiments in his lyrics from unexpected vantages.