Battling and beating cancer, then becoming a father for the first time, pushed him to create what he calls a “genuine rock record,” which he recorded in just a few takes at Alex Farrar’s renowned Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, where both Wednesday and MJ Lenderman have tracked records. Each jocular, earnest story slides into the next with ease, rooted firmly in the present rather than straining for some greater significance. More geographically ambiguous than  (2022), the album’s jangly piano and wailing pedal steel impart a lived-in expansiveness that belongs to any unkempt, cinematic stretch of the country.

Much like the boundless highway where it begs to be played loud with the windows down, the album’s cast of NFL chuds and hardworking everymen burning the candle at both ends could exist in any of the tiny towns scattered between rolling mountains and atmospheric swamps. Unlike the glossy textures on A Billion Little Lights (2021),  possesses a tired and jagged weariness, its palms caked with dirt.

Behind every jab directed towards the people you pass on these endless, monotonous drives is a sombre capitulation to the downstream effects of capitalism and corporatism that shaft us all. “ It leaches into everything, the way we consume music, how you live your life every day, and it sucks. It’s discouraging. It feels like you’ll never really be free from that. It seems impossible to live outside of the system,” Ross elaborates.