At first listen, some could say Zach Bryan’s newest album, “With Heaven on Top,” is formulaic. He’s singing about the heart-wrenching challenges his music typically centers on: sobriety, the loss of his mother, how fame strains relationships, old friends, God and love.
There are haunting songs sung over traditional guitar and references to specific places all over the country, from the West Village to Cannon Beach, hallmarks of a Bryan tune.
But stick around for a second listen and you will be rewarded with 25 songs full of moments that are sonically unique for Bryan. He comes at these topics from a new perspective and captures something that few radio hits, country or not, even get close to today.
This is clearest on the track, “DeAnn’s Denim,” a song about his mother and the traits we receive from our parents. The haunting wordplay between “genes” and “denim” is poignant. Bryan gives an aged, broader look at his relationship to his mother than listeners got in the 2019 album named after her.
“With Heaven on Top” is not perfect. “Skin” is startlingly bitter, biting and it seethes with an immaturely portrayed anger. Bryan sings, “I’m taking a blade to my own skin, And I ain’t never touching yours again,” potentially in reference to his breakup and abuse allegations from his ex-girlfriend Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia. While a decent song, it is tastelessly thrown into the tabloid and diss track drama that exists between the two.
The second half of the album loses momentum and some songs, like “Sundown Girls” and “Camper,” blend together to feel like a glob of guitar strumming. But his love songs, “Plastic Cigarette” and “Dry Deserts,” shine immensely. These tracks feature him at his best, combining the universality of heart break and new love with the specificities of someone “with her swim top still wet” and being under “napalm skies.”
Bryan is more political than usual in “Bad News,” especially with lyrics like, “And ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is gonna come bust down your door.” In the final and titular song, “With Heaven on Top,” he sings, “We’ll fight for our flags in some foreign place / While those greedy politician boys all rat race.”
These moments, in the same way when he references places or highways, make him seem like an everyday guy and reminds listeners that he’s experiencing the same turbulent political world writing music as we are listening to it in. He surely doesn’t do much to fix these issues, but makes a brief effort in a genre that often avoids, if not blatantly rejects, musicians talking about their political views.
Something constant in Bryan’s large discography is the way he openly grapples with whether he even wants to be doing what he’s doing. In this addition, he does the same.
On “South and Pine” he sings about “A f—ing show for more blood money.” On “Santa Fe,” he says maybe he’ll “Never talk to no one again and never sing another song,” and laments about the loneliness of the road, being loved, friends and alcohol.
Like time and time again, he alludes to the fact that he might give it all up and finally move to find the simple life he often sings about.
As a listener, you are tempted to believe it, but then are reminded by rousing tracks like “Dry Deserts” and “Anyways” that at his core, Bryan is an entertainer. He writes songs that are meant to be sung on stages, big and small, to equally heartbroken fans screaming the lyrics back at him, which I predict he won’t be giving up anytime soon.
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