Wild Pink - ILYSM

John Ross had already started writing what would become Wild Pink's fourth album when he was diagnosed with cancer partway through the process. Everything that followed took on new weight. ILYSM, its title short for I Love You So Much, grew out of that diagnosis and the two years of treatment that followed, built as much from Ross's gratitude for the people who carried him through it, especially his wife, as from the fear itself.

The band's widescreen, heartland-tinged rock sound stays intact, but the record's twelve songs move through a stranger, more disorienting emotional geography, ghosts, angels, and aliens wandering between hotel parking lots and the surface of the moon. "Hold My Hand" pairs Ross with Julien Baker, and the guest list runs deep beyond her, with J Mascis, Yasmin Williams, Ryley Walker, and Samantha Crain all contributing to a record co-produced by Ross alongside Justin Pizzoferrato and the Antlers' Peter Silberman, whose own catalog of illness and recovery songwriting makes him a fitting collaborator here.

ILYSM arrived as the follow-up to 2021's A Billion Little Lights, a record that had already established Wild Pink among the most quietly beloved bands in American indie rock, praised for being one of the prettiest rock records of its decade. Where that album worked in wide-open wonder, ILYSM turns the lens inward without losing any of the band's sense of scale, transforming Ross's hardest year into something that plays like transcendence rather than confession.

Released on Royal Mountain Records, this vinyl pressing captures Wild Pink at their most emotionally direct, a record that treats survival itself as a kind of expansive, strange beauty.