The label announced itself in May with a song that Rose fans had been waiting more than ten years to own. 'Yip Yip Yow' has existed since the mid-2010s - it opened a NPR Tiny Desk session back in 2015 - and has since crept into the US radio Top 25 at AAA, a placing the accompanying notes attribute to programmer support alone. Every attempt to record it over the years failed, and the reason turns out to be quality control in reverse.

"The song is really dipshit style," they explain. "It makes more sense for it to be played by some linebackers who don't know how to play their instruments. I made that mistake many times over the years, trying to record it. It always sounded too slick." Even this time, it nearly got scrapped until producer John Congleton sped it up, binned the click track and made everyone play in the room together.

"I told the players, who are some of the best session players in the universe, to play like 15-year-olds in a garage, and it made all the difference. That, and I am finally confident enough in myself and as a musician to feel it's okay to put out dumb-sounding music every once in a while. I've put out heady music and I will again, and this can live as just what it is."

The song was written about feeling born in the wrong time, the wrong place, and probably the wrong everything else too. A decade hasn't blunted any of that. "I still feel like an outsider," Rose says. "Sometimes that makes me sad, like my mix of interests are just too jarring or unpalatable for people, but most of the time it makes me feel good to be different, or to be whoever/whatever I am."

That mix of interests deserves unpacking, because Rose's whole catalogue is a running battle against the idea that an artist should be one flavour forever. "The consumerist side of the music industry has resulted in my having some shame around exploring different sounds and styles throughout my career," they admit. "Like I should be a McDonald's cheeseburger or something."

They started out in Americana, and are disarmingly frank about the road in: "Pretty much 100% because of my love for Ryan Adams. I modelled my whole career after him, signed with his same agent and A&R and everything. Even back then, he had a pretty horrible reputation, and everyone told me to run when I said I'd love to meet him, but I was deeply connected to his music."

A couple of records in, DIY friends handed over The Cramps, Suicide, Tom Waits, Wanda Jackson, Hasil Adkins, and everything changed shape. "What I was actually much more interested in was a kind of Lynchian version of Americana, where you might find a severed finger amidst the freshly mowed sod lawn." They had a name for the sound, too. "At the time I called this sound 'Schizodrift', which was a fusion of surf, pop, electro, folk, punk, et al, but maybe a better name would be like Hyper-Americana or something."

Hyper-Americana it is, then - if only because it took us two years to learn Sprechtgesang. 'Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall' is where the next evolution lands: eleven tracks that open with 'Yip Yip Yow' itself and run through titles like 'Valery (please don't be mad at me)', 'Conversation with Shiv (AKA liquid k song)' and 'Goddamn Train', with the accompanying notes reaching for "Ennio Morricone with an AR15" by way of description.

New single 'Chow Mein' is the calling card, and in those same notes, Rose frames it like a filmmaker: "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."

Ask what they wanted this record to do that previous ones couldn't, and you'll get something close to a grand plan. "It feels confidently like its own thing, but also a subtle amalgamation of my past records, which is what I was hoping to get out of it. That's pretty much what I told Congleton when he asked what type of record I wanted to make. A unified sound, and I knew I wanted it to thrash."

That slug year taught them the method: the whole album was done in ten or twelve days. "There was a spontaneity to it that I think is really important; it needs to feel good, to feel free. When I look back on mistakes I've made, they all have to do with overthinking things." Anything surprise them in the process? "How hard it can be to trust someone with your work."

For all the jokes, there's a bruise here worth pressing gently. Rose has spent years being told their genre-hopping is a riddle to be solved, and they've had enough of it. "Journalists and the business people in the industry have really forced me to rethink that, and honestly, it's so annoying," they say, as we physically flinch a bit under the reversed critical microscope. "I love my fans so so so much, but if I started thinking about what they think of me and my music, it will ruin something beautiful and free about the process of creativity and self-expression. It's scary, but I can't be thinking about how my music will be received."

"I have a solid fanbase now," they continue, "which is so cool, but I still often feel lonely, like I am misunderstood within the music industry."

Which is where the brand new SUCK Records starts looking like the solution. Rose is Grammy-nominated, note, for art-directing their own album sleeve. This isn't someone who is a hands-off creative, leaving everything to the office to put in place; running a label proper is just the last wall coming down. And the independence runs deeper than business, too. The album's accompanying notes detail years spent organising alongside musicians, venue workers and independent crews for stronger labour protections and collective bargaining rights - in their words, creative practice and political practice "have increasingly become the same project".

"We know how it all works now," they shrug. "It's more simple than you'd think." The day-to-day is unglamorous - "a lot of dotting i's and crossing t's, making sure everything is legal and protected, graphics, website, etc" - but the freedom is total. "A lot of the ideas my manager and I come up with are untraditional, so you could say my career is basically one big experiment. Now we just don't have anyone telling us it's a bad idea."

Those experiments are already running, and the ideas seem anything but bad. This summer brought a string of pop-up shows in secret independent spaces with zero ticketing fees, while autumn brings a big support run with Modest Mouse. Once the album lands, they're finally headed this way, with a run of UK and Ireland in-store shows through late October and November, from Rough Trade East down to Dublin's Spindizzy. And the rest of 2026? "Lots and lots of travelling. My garden is probably going to die."

A dying garden, a thrashing record, a label called SUCK and a horse being gentled outside a poet's shopping centre. Somewhere in Virginia, the screensaver clouds roll on, and the freest artist in America is bored in the best possible way. Let them go in whatever direction their inspiration takes them.

Caroline Rose's album 'Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall' is out 23rd October.