I’m all for being a prolific S.O.B.—hell, I interviewed nearly 150 musicians in one calendar year—but it’s concerning how fast Zach Bryan’s pen moves. Since putting out DeAnn in 2019, the Navy cadet-turned-global phenom has released 124 songs across six albums (112 in this decade alone), including 34 on 2022’s American Heartbreak. But this guy’s not Bob Pollard; he shouldn’t be averaging 20 songs a record. Bryan’s last effort, The Great American Bar Scene, had a lot to love (“Pink Skies” landed on Paste’s SOTY list in 2024 for a reason), but it also had a lot of room for error. That comes with the territory of sharing a double, sometimes triple album. But that doesn’t matter much to Bryan. He’s a real worker—an everyman with an itch for multi-hour, coast-to-coast shows—and his album runtimes capture a creator allergic to stasis.
I can appreciate that, just as I can appreciate when the biggest crossover star in America writes all of his own songs. Ten years ago, artists started putting out 2xLPs to game Billboard’s adaptive album sales formula (a formula that counts 1,500 individual song streams as one album sale), conflating streaming cheat codes with creativity. Bryan’s prolific streak doesn’t feel strategically poisoned like, say, Morgan Wallen’s does. My high school graduating class had 48 people in it. It took 52 people to write Wallen’s I’m the Problem. I’ll take Bryan’s sprawling habits over focus-group-generated slop ten times out of ten. His blue-collar, red-dirt storytelling is all over these 25 songs. Yeah, With Heaven On Top is as long as a feature film. There’s also an acoustic version of it that Bryan released this week because he assumed the record “is just like all the other ones and there’s gonna be a billion people saying it’s overproduced and shitty so I sat down in a room by myself and recorded all the songs acoustically so I didn’t have to hear everyone whine about more stuff.”
I think Bryan’s being too hard on himself, because With Heaven On Top is handily the most sonically adventurous LP he’s made yet, thanks to a hefty new backdrop of horns from Isaac Washam, Austin Stunkard, William Werthimer, Ryan Hatcher, and Greg Fallis, harmonies from Grumpy’s Heaven Schmitt, and strings courtesy of Ana Monwah Lei, Lucas Ruge-Jones, Samantha Uzbay, Hannah Cohen, and Sasha Ono. A lot of these songs sound huge—big enough for, say, a college football stadium full of 112,000 people—so any “overproduction” is working wonders for an always-ambitious Bryan. Rather, it’s the same old shit—that guitar-and-a-microphone get-up—that gets too formulaic for my taste. In this chapter of his career, he’s doing less Nebraska and more Wildflowers. He’s tapping into the rambunctious parts of the Turnpike Troubadours while letting go of the mistake-making that his live shows so often prioritize.
When he sits in the polish but doesn’t lose sight of his muscle, Bryan sounds like the real deal, but he boxes himself into a corner on With Heaven On Top. The 23-person ensemble he’s put together is exceptional, yet he’s still biting off far more than he can chew. With Heaven On Top blurs more than it bangs, quite frankly. For every track as rich as the mandolin-filled “Santa Fe,” there’s a stripped-down crooner like “Say Why” ready to undercut the Southwestern bombast. There’s flavor but no momentum, and it’s especially disappointing when a storm of mid-tempo filler—like the bleary soup of nothingness between “Plastic Cigarette” and the title track—goes on too long. In fact, there are at least three, maybe four, multi-song stretches on this album that fail to yield anything significant to my ear. I’m talking about “Drowning,” “If They Come Lookin’,” “All Good Things Past,” and “Sundown Girls”—fine songs, sure, but ones that don’t go anywhere. And on an album that makes a couple-dozen intercontinental stops, that starts to feel a bit brutal.
But there is a great record here, scattered across the bloated 78-minute runtime. The record stumbles in and out of ideas about faith and the American Dream, but the devil of maternal loss and generational addiction is persistent but quiet.“DeAnn’s Denim” is Bryan’s strongest ballad since “Pink Skies,” because the way he writes about his late mom is always heavy and beautiful, even if the genes/jeans wordplay gets worn out fast. The best moment of his career thus far is when he lets go of a sobering picture late in the track: “Sometimes denim is an ugly thing.” He does it again when he says goodbye to a dying pal whose “blood sucks from an IV” on the deeply personal “Cannonball.”
Even the intimate “South and Pine” is affecting, as it reclines into a full-band melodrama that’s just bittersweet enough to excuse an out-of-pocket line like “a fucking show for more blood money” that cuts into the love-and-loss waltz. For a moment, I couldn’t help but think “What the fuck is this guy even talking about?”—but then I remembered, this is a Zach Bryan album. No-context one-liners are sort of his thing. He’s gonna rest on that worn Oklahoman voice of his when the words fail him or don’t quite fit together, which is why a track like “You Can Still Come Home” is such a disappointment: the horns and saxophones and fiddles and pedal steel and pianos take the edge off his sandpaper howl. The same thing happens during “All Good Things Past.”
Bryan’s had a few Top 20 hits over the years, including his duet with Kacey Musgraves that went to #1 and won a Grammy, but there’s a song on With Heaven On Top that’s got real mainstream potential; “Slicked Back” could go absolutely gangbusters if the people let it. It’s a bouncy singalong that splinters after Noah Legros’ talkative guitar uproots the “When I get to Hell or Heaven, can I bring my girl? ‘Cause she likes romance, good sex, music, and ruling the world” dating-app prompt chorus. It’s chart food because the music’s cozy, homespun, and big-time catchy. It’s also chart food because it’s generic and kitschy, a perfect spoonful of medicine for ringing ears in the cheap seats at Bryan’s never-ending stadium shows.
Bryan’s had a big 16 months and With Heaven On Top, he tries to make sense of some, but not all of it: he jawed online with John Moreland and Gavin Adcock; he became the subject of a diss track by Dave Portnoy, the biggest douchebag on the internet (which made Bryan more generally likeable than he’s ever been); he even got hitched to Samantha Leonard in Spain on New Year’s Eve. Most importantly, he got his tired ass off the road in 2025, as he sings about in “Anyways”: going “underneath the covers, trying to hide from the world outside.” On the surging “Appetite” he’s in Arkansas playing his songs to crowds that “don’t care at all,” worrying about passing his bad habits onto a future child, and figuring out how to deal with the cornball traps of celebrity. A woman whispers in his ear and puts his worries to rest, telling him to not give in to the pressures of touring and to not “let those greedy bastards win somehow.” Bryan’s biggest enemy is himself. His second-biggest enemy is the upper-class. Amen, brother.
Bryan’s high-profile split from Barstool’s Brianna LaPaglia—which included an NDA, emotional abuse allegations, and tell-all YouTube videos—doesn’t get much attention on With Heaven On Top, save for the nasty but bare-chested “Skin,” where Bryan talks about removing the matching tattoo he got with LaPaglia with a razor blade. I’m glad he doesn’t spend too much time talking about that breakup, because I don’t care about it. I don’t care much for Bryan’s personal life either, but I dig how non-hamfisted his love songs are. “Plastic Cigarette” is especially pleasant, and the last lines (“I saw you on the river’s edge, draggin’ on a plastic cigarette with your swim top still wet”) make vaping sound halfway pretty. But then Bryan pits LaPaglia and Leonard against each other on “Slicked Back,” talking about how a girl who paints is superior to a girl with an online personality because he’s such a private guy or whatever. You win some, you lose some, I guess.
It drives me fucking crazy when Bryan’s songs don’t make a lick of sense, in large part because, when they do make sense, he’s just one of the best there is. Look at a tune like “Miles,” where Bryan looks inward and spits out all the meaning he can find: “If I’m so fucked up, why you lookin’?” There’s a high tally of good verbiage here, overall. I was particularly taken aback by this line in “Runny Eggs”: “I’ll sing the wrong damn song in the wrong damn key / But no matter where I go, I pray to always find home.” With Heaven On Top shines when Bryan puts images like “smiling like a thief with your cheek-tearing teeth,” “I’m a seventh-generation country boy, my father used Redman tobacco bags as baby toys,” and “the yellow lines go on forever, the highway’s just the moon but better” into the air. That’s the Zach Bryan I enjoy best, the guy who’s having a closed-Bible crisis in a dank Best Western room with the shades drawn—the guy who’s getting older and struggling to get sober while his friends settle down around him. That’s why “Appetite” and the title track are goddamn awesome. (Both songs featuring Heaven Schmitt on backup vox is probably just a coincidence.) “Appetite” is restless, punchy—feeding off the band’s big burst of horns. “With Heaven On Top” is more solemn, complicated. Bryan’s worried about “cuttin’ up and cuttin’ shit too close” but sedates himself with a time-honored promise: “Every hard time, song rhyme, friend you’ve got you’ll have with Heaven on top.”
With Heaven On Top made headlines before it even had a name. In October, Bryan shared a snippet of “Bad News” on his Instagram account—doling out the lines “ICE is gonna come bust down your door, try and build a house no one builds no more”—and caught the ire of his conservative fanbase. Right-wingers called him an “illegal sympathizer.” Assistant secretary of public affairs Tricia McLaughlin told him to “stick to ‘Pink Skies’.” Always-relevant country singer John Rich wrote on X, “Who’s ready for the Zach Bryan-Dixie Chicks tour? Prob a huge Bud Light sponsorship for this one.” Bryan resurfaced online to let everyone know that they misconstrued the song, writing that he was “on neither of these radical sides.” His attempt to appeal to both sides of the aisle didn’t paint him as an intellectual moderate but a coward, because walking art back is a coward’s game.
“Bad News” is almost a great song, one that takes the “this land is your land, this land is my land” proverb and nearly spins it into a compelling tale about Bryan missing the country he “served eight years” in the Navy fighting for. But Bryan didn’t want “Bad News” to be read as a political song, he even said it himself (weird, then, to clock ICE by name, but I digress). He sure as hell doesn’t sing it with the spirit of somebody who means the words “the fading of the red, white, and blue.” Of course, the song sits heavier on the ears now, with the consequences of Renee Good’s murder sitting overhead. Through no fault of Bryan’s own, his non-political political song came out the same week an ICE agent killed an unarmed woman in Minneapolis. Maybe it’s bad luck. Or maybe it’s an overdue realization: obviously, you can’t write about ICE or “the right’s gone red and the left’s gone woke” and call yourself apolitical. Bryan’s frustrations do reach a boiling point: “Every day on the news, someone else is shot,” his raspy holler lets out, and he’s almost figured it out. But being a “sing it like you see it” kind of songwriter has its setbacks. Violence is a detail but not a motivation on “Bad News.” Its fiddle-and-horns-backed bar-lit sentimentality is there to help contextualize the life Bryan lives with his “degenerate” friends, the “cocky motherfucker” cops chasing them, and a stereo that won’t let the Springsteen song play all the way through. It’s a frustrating, if not maddening revelation, mostly because Bryan’s usually a much better writer than that.
The worst parts of “Bad News” reveal With Heaven On Top’s weakest attribute. As they would say in wrestling, Zach Bryan is going into business for himself. The album rambles across a lot of America: New York City neighborhoods, all of Oklahoma, California highways, Reno, Kansas City, Chicago, Santa Fe. Bryan’s on a plane to Spain and daydreaming about Byron Bay in Australia. So much geography and so many miles, yet the album rarely steps outside of Bryan himself. It’s easy to hate Ticketmaster, because everybody hates Ticketmaster, but I’d like to see Bryan just once stand by a conviction that alienates one side of the fence he’s been sitting on. Years go by and leftists want Bryan to stick up for the underdogs he’s always claimed to be one of, MAGAs want him to keep his head down and sing the damn songs, and I want him to be mainstream country music’s last ticket out of fascist hell. But what does Zach Bryan want? To be honest with you, I’m not too sure.
On With Heaven On Top, he’s being pulled in a thousand directions, most of which aren’t leading him anywhere fantastic. I miss the Bryan from American Heartbreak, who’d surely beat the ass of the Bryan putting more heart into the “you’re so cool in my living room and when you talk trash with your hair slicked back” couplet in “Slicked Back” than 75% of the album. But some songs in this 78-minute passage genuinely moved me, because Bryan is soul-wrecking and deeply compelling when he’s telling someone else’s story or clawing his way out of a total hellhole. I like hearing him sing about being in love. I like the count-offs and the misbehaving anecdotes. I like it when the barn’s burning all the way down. But most of all, I like when Bryan’s not adrift down the path of superstardom, which he especially isn’t on “Appetite,” the title track, “DeAnn’s Denim,” “Anyways,” and “Cannonball.” I just wish there was a better record around those parts. Zach Bryan is this close to being the generational great that his ticket sales suggest he is. He’s just not there yet.
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
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