CD of The Week

Throughout their career, Caroline Rose has been a glorious shapeshifter. From their early twangy singer-songwriter work to the quirky LONER to the heartbroken The Art of Forgetting, you don’t know what’s coming next. After 2025’s lo-fi year of the slug, Rose is back in full force on Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall. Working with super-producer John Congleton, it’s their best work in years.

Gentling the Horse… kicks off with “Yip Yip Yow,” a joyous cowpunk ode to being a weirdo (“a tipped cow in a minivan town”) that Rose has been playing live for years but never quite captured in the studio until now. “Chow Mein” is a fun tune about being a mess… both emotionally and because of that thrown-up Chinese food in the backseat.

Album highlight “Valery (please don’t be mad at me)” crams in a fart joke and a Pokémon reference into a song about past friends who struggled with heroin. “Hello Again, Jim” is a blast of a rocker mocking a music industry jagoff bragging about his past exploits: “Viper Room was cool in the 90s / You were blowing lines in the bathroom with Johnny and Leo.” Of course, “Calm” is anything but that, while the shout-y “RIDE (!!!)” has Rose yelping a stream of consciousness over grimy guitar riffs.

The pace only really slows down for the acoustic “Notes to Teenage Self,” looking back on their younger days with the promise that “Baby, you will get through this.”

Last year’s year of the slug was a bedroom recording Rose put out for the fans first and foremost and three of its songs reappear on Gentling the Horse… The roaring “Goddamn Train” is bigger and bolder, while “Conversation With Shiv (AKA liquid k song)” gets a fuller makeover, sounding better than the drum machine-based track we spun on Y-Not Radio last year. And the album wraps up with “Everything in its Right Place,” not a Radiohead cover… it was actually the opener to year of the slug, but flips to a very appropriate closer for this record, finding Caroline in a meditative state.

As impressive as their genre and mood hopping has been over the years, this is the lane that Caroline Rose seems most fully themselves – mixing off-kilter indie rock, catchy riffs, and skewed humor with emotional truths. Caroline Rose returns to Philadelphia at Union Transfer on March 26th.