An Americana singer-songwriter releasing a 25-song behemoth clocking in at 1 hour and 18 minutes: cue the panic and cold sweats… Everyone stay calm, the ghost of an aimless Ryan Adams hasn’t possessed him just yet.
In 2024, Zach Bryan released The Great American Bar Scene, an album that could easily be the pinnacle of many country artists’ careers; naturally, anticipation for his next LP (and it is long) was sky-high. Expectations are met, but at the cost of a certain artistic plateauing that his previous works didn’t hint at.
He arrives with another batch of pure alt-country tracks where Nebraska-era Springsteen looms large under the shadow of his recent divorce and sobriety, featuring instrumentation as simple as it is effective. It might be more lacking in hooks and risks than TGABS, but standouts like “Bad News,” “Anyways,” or “Santa Fe” more than make up for it. It is difficult and far too early to speak of a slump because, unlike the notorious Adams, there are no stylistic tangents or filler here: there is simply a rock-solid contemporary country record.