Zach Bryan’s Stubborn, Shaggy New Album

In 2019, it seemed possible that the next big country star would be a Navy aviation ordnanceman from Oklahoma named Zach Bryan, who recorded scruffy videos of himself hollering fervent lyrics about nights that lasted forever and relationships that didn’t. “I put as much thought as I could into, like, writing the songs,” he told the country critic Grady Smith, in a YouTube interview that summer. “And no thought into how I was going to put it out there.” Listeners found him anyway—helped, no doubt, by social-media algorithms that can spot a new viral hit long before human gatekeepers catch on. “Heading South,” one of Bryan’s first songs to draw a large audience, had a refrain that served as a declaration of regional pride. “Don’t stop headin’, headin’ south / ’Cause they will understand the words that are pouring from your mouth,” he sang, sounding like a young man who had finally found his place in the world. The polemical music site Saving Country Music suggested that Bryan could stand to “refine his guitar playing and delivery,” but it also made a prediction: “Zach Bryan will have a strong career in country music if he so chooses.”

The prediction turned out to be about halfway accurate. In the past six years, Bryan, now twenty-nine, has built not merely a strong career but a singular one, and he has done it without much changing his no-frills approach. He ranked No. 8 on Spotify’s 2025 list of the most popular musicians in America, and in September he drew more than a hundred and twelve thousand fans to a concert at the University of Michigan football stadium; according to the industry site Pollstar, it was the biggest concert in U.S. history, excluding festivals and free shows. And yet Bryan wears his “country” identity lightly, when he wears it at all. He has generally ignored country radio, and been ignored by it in turn. Neither his voice nor his arrangements are particularly twangy, and the bars he sings about tend to be not honky-tonks but, rather, places like McGlinchey’s, a Philadelphia dive that he mentioned in an appealingly ragged tune called “28.” That song appeared on Bryan’s 2024 album, “The Great American Bar Scene,” which included, in a sign of his growing stature and not-quite-country identity, a pair of high-profile guests: John Mayer and Bruce Springsteen.

Since Bryan’s début, words haven’t stopped pouring from his mouth. His songs are propelled by idiomatic lyrics that sound as if they have been set to music only begrudgingly; many of his albums begin with a poem, as if to confirm that he has more verses than melodies to put them to. Last year, for the first time since 2021, there was no new Zach Bryan album, though fans still got a half-dozen new songs, along with a series of updates about his life. He carried on a public dispute with his ex-girlfriend Brianna LaPaglia, a podcaster, who had previously accused him of “narcissistic emotional abuse”; in the summer, footage emerged of him scaling a barbed-wire-topped fence in an apparent attempt to fight the country singer Gavin Adcock, who had accused him of phoniness; about two months after the incident, he announced, on Instagram, that he hadn’t had a drink in nearly two months, and suggested that he had been using alcohol to cope with “earth-shattering panic attacks”; on New Year’s Eve, in Spain, he got married, for the second time, and shared a video of himself singing Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest” at the reception.

The marriage may have pleased Zach Bryan fans who want him to chill out and settle down, but his new album, which he released earlier this month, is more likely to please the other ones, who may well constitute the majority. It is called “With Heaven on Top,” and it is a shaggy record composed of twenty-four songs (and one poem) about chasing peace of mind around the world. There are no high-profile guests, unless you count the horn players who arrive at the beginning of the third track, “Appetite,” serving not to add polish but to subtract it. Much of the playing on the album is cheerfully imprecise; Bryan has said it was recorded in a handful of houses in Oklahoma, but the recordings, which include sing-alongs and stray noises, evoke the blurry conviviality of a bar band at the moment between last call and lights on. “Slicked Back,” about romantic bliss, seems to have been written under the influence of Tom Petty—when Bryan sings, “You’re so cool,” he could almost be Petty, drawling, “Yer so bad.” And on “River and Creeks,” a frisky ballad about fickle lovers, he tries out both a yipping falsetto and an Elvis-ish baritone.

Unlike many country-inspired singer-songwriters, though, Bryan doesn’t seem intent on re-creating an earlier musical era. His music, with its simple strumming and its unmediated lyrics, is generally too plain to be retro. Some of the early reactions to the album concerned not the music but the lyrics. “Bad News,” which Bryan previewed in October, features a reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE is gonna come bust down your door”); this alarmed some of his fans and excited others. But the song turns out to be less a protest than a nonpartisan lament: “Got some bad news / Fading of our red, white, and blue.” And “Skin,” a breakup song about an ex-lover with tattoos, has been widely interpreted as a new chapter in his ongoing exchange with LaPaglia, who has plenty of tattoos, and who has said that Bryan got a tattoo of her early in their relationship. “I’m taking a blade to my own skin,” he sings, or, rather, sneers. “And I ain’t never touching yours again.”

Bryan’s startling success—no one knew an ornery troubadour could be this popular, in this era—has helped build an audience for a cohort of like-minded singer-songwriters: Sam Barber, from Missouri, specializes in desolate ballads; Waylon Wyatt, from Arkansas, sings country breakup songs with a quaver and a hint of a yodel. Last year, Bryan uploaded a video of himself singing and strumming with an emerging singer-songwriter named Joshua Slone. Slone has a much softer and more plaintive voice and, judging from his finely wrought songs, a tendency to contend with heartbreak not by going out and raging but by staying in and ruminating. Especially compared with a singer like Slone, Bryan is an uncommonly stubborn performer: to enjoy his songs, you have to enjoy his halfway hoarse voice and his tendency to stray from the tune, not to mention his willingness to return time and again to familiar themes and familiar bars, like McGlinchey’s, which makes a return appearance on “With Heaven on Top.”