Caroline Rose
Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall
SUCK
Caroline Rose’s records are propulsive—the perfect music for a long drive. Tracks like “Yip Yip Yow,” “Chow Mein,” and “Valery (Please Don’t Be Mad at Me)” fill out the songwriter’s latest rock-and-roll soundtrack to cruising through unfiltered 2026 Americana, evoking scenes of a fishtailing sedan belching black smoke as a duct-taped square of soggy cardboard flaps in a passenger-side window. Songs on Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall find their protagonists ordering too much Taco Bell or Hardee’s in the middle of the night with a “trashbag of debt,” or recalling the druggy haze of the Viper Room in the ’90s with Johnny Depp and Leo DiCaprio. Together, these visual snippets create a nearly surrealist tableau of the American dream.
Produced by John Congleton, Gentling marries cynicism and beauty in its observations on crumbling American suburbia. Rose grew up on Long Island, where the titular shopping center is located. They found it amusing that this South Huntington hamlet named a mall after America’s most famous bohemian gay poet whose work was an ideological foundation for socialist ideals and environmentalism for decades to come. The strange image of gentling—rather than breaking—a wild stallion in the middle of an American shopping mall also lodged inside Rose’s mind like a burr, and the songs on the album aptly thrum with afterparty energy. The foundations for many of them were built last year with the surprise-released Year of the Slug LP, a GarageBand testing ground for some of the new record’s best songs. The transition from home to a studio to dial in the fuzz just a hair makes for one of the most breakneck rock albums of 2026.
Gentling vibrates on its own plane outside of what Rose’s fans have grown accustomed to since 2020’s Superstar or 2018’s Loner. Here, Rose blends synthpop, alt-country, psychobilly, and punk into a thick and crunchy milkshake. The first few tracks of the album blast through the suburbs—or physically embody elements of them—before souls are sold at bargain rates on “Notes to Teenage Self.” There’s time for the unexpected, as well, as heard on the Jon Brion–esque vibe-out track “Conversation with Shiv” and the rollicking “Hello Again, Jim,” the latter of which rips sarcastic lines as long as cocaine in the aforementioned storied sleazy LA rock club. “Do you think me a simp? / I carve my turkey thick, not thin”—that’s just one of many memorable lyrics on the track made entirely bearable by Rose’s delivery.
The album’s cover art nails the beautiful duality of most tracks: a painting of a cheetah prowling an East LA suburbia while a palm tree burns down like a matchstick, a handgun placed on the foregrounded dashboard. No answers are provided over the course of this album, but these tracks rip and soak in the moments they depict. In the words of the self-proclaimed “coolest motherfucker ever hit the ground now”: “This world is too ignorant to see clearly that nothing really matters.”
