Album Review: Zach Bryan’s “With Heaven on Top”

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...

Preview: ~500 words