John Gallagher Jr. Navigates an In-Between Stage with ‘Almost Okay’ EP

John Gallagher Jr.’s new EP Almost Okay isn’t a grand statement. It’s a five-song snapshot from a reset. After a breakup record and the abrupt closure of Swept Away, the Avett Brothers musical where he starred, Gallagher returned to the studio with a five-piece band to make something immediate. “This is what one must cling to in dark times of doubt,” he told Kyle Meredith recently, describing the unpolished live sessions that gave the EP its ragged, breathing shape.

The songs capture a specific restlessness. “Tough Spit,” a sardonic rocker, was written during the 2024 election cycle, when scrolling left him feeling unmoored. “I feel like I’m losing my mind,” he said, pointing to the whiplash between promoting creative work and falling into algorithmic dread. Still, the track finds comedy in the anxiety, channeling the wry fatalism of influences like John Prine and Paul Westerberg. Gallagher has long mined personal unease for public songs, but here the lean arrangements leave no hiding place.

He also spoke about a small role in Mike Flanagan’s upcoming Exorcist retooling. “He’s an amazing filmmaker,” Gallagher said. “He’s going to do some very cool stuff with the material; I think people are going to be really surprised and pleased with it.” The detour into horror fits a year spent recalibrating—returning to music not as promotion, but as a kind of necessary pulse.