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.”