Caroline Rose (she/they) announces their new album, Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall, out October 23 via SUCK Records, and releases the new single, ‘Chow Mein.’
Caroline Rose has always found the surreal embedded within the banal, and Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall pushes that instinct to its furthest edge. The record constructs a hyperreal Americana fantasy where everyday life is asked to reveal its underbelly. The release doubles as the debut of SUCK records, Rose’s own imprint—a fitting next form for an enigmatic artist whose work resists settling into one shape.
Working with producer John Congleton, Rose built the album through humor, layering, and instinct rather than polish. It pairs sharply observed, memoiristic songwriting with expansive guitar textures that render the everyday with violent clarity and mythic scale. Beneath its melodic sweep and signature hooks runs a current of violence and American dream leakage. It’s Ennio Morricone with an AR15: surf guitars, spaghetti westerns, and suburban dread colliding until they become their own sharp vernacular.
The record dips into caricature to tell stories through Rose’s idiosyncratic aesthetic fantasies, as on ‘Chow Mein,’ which lurches between menace and slapstick: “a bouncer at the door // he asks for the password // I’m already drunk cause I // can’t afford a cocktail // I pause before I throw up all over his tailored suit.”
Reflecting on ‘Chow Mein,’ Rose says, “A lot of my songs I think of as scenes in a movie. I relate to characters who are a little strange, who are outsiders, who seem to fuck up a lot or find themselves in awkward situations. Most of these stories are just pulled directly from scenes in my own life, so the character is basically always some version of myself. This is a story about trying too hard to be cool and act normal, but everything is going wrong.”
Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall:
- Yip Yip Yow
- Chow Mein
- Valery (please don’t be mad at me)
- Cement Head
- Goddamn Train
- Notes to Teenage Self
- Conversation with Shiv (AKA liquid k song)
- Hello Again, Jim
- Calm
- RIDE (!!!)
- Everything in its Right Place
