Premature Evaluation: Zach Bryan With Heaven On Top

"Douchebag." That's the word that I keep seeing. In certain corners of the internet, any mention of Zach Bryan's name induces heavy eye-rolls. Those corners often include the comments section of this very website.

It happens. Bryan is in the news a lot. Sometimes, it's because we're still figuring out just how popular the young Oklahoma-born singer-songwriter truly is. More often, though, it's because he's getting into some embarrassing public shenanigans. He's trying to fight some other singer, or some other singer is trying to fight him, or he's messily breaking up with someone, or he's suddenly marrying someone else. He seems like he's about to take some political stance, and then he walks it back. He's got all this success, but he still seems to blunder through the world, alternately embracing and rejecting his new status as a public figure. Do Bryan's dusty, low-key country-rock tunes justify the antics? For plenty of people, and maybe for you the reader, the answer is clearly no. Fair enough.

I don't know whether Zach Bryan is a douchebag. Never met the man. He could be. Plenty of people are. Plenty of musicians who don't have Bryan's fervent, colossal following are douchebags, or at least they've come off as douchebags in my tiny interactions with them. When Bryan first rose up to wild, disorienting levels of success a few years ago, it was tempting to anoint him as a new prince, a game-changer, the person who could drag rawthentic underdog dust-kicking underground values into the fetid, curdled country mainstream. But Bryan isn't interested in being a voice for anything larger than himself, and it turns out that he's really just some guy. If you project anything on this man, you will be disappointed. If you think that the greats only become greats because they stand for something, then Zach Bryan is not one of the greats.

I don't subscribe to that particular set of beliefs about what it means to be a great artist, and I still don't think Zach Bryan is one of the greats. He's pretty good, though. In individual moments, he can be great. Some of that is his connection to crowds, which amounts to sheer spectacle. In 2023, I saw Bryan headline his first-ever arena show, and I was blown away by all the love and enthusiasm in the room. A few months ago, Bryan played to more than 112,000 people in what's billed as the largest ticketed concert in the history of the United States. If you can do that while making profoundly unslick music, you have unlocked something.

But beyond all that context business, Bryan has some songs that will absolutely fuck me up if I hear them in the right moment. "Oklahoma Smokeshow"? "Pink Skies"? "Open The Gate"? I'd take his Noah Kahan duet "Sarah's Place" over anything else that Kahan has ever done. Bryan has an exceptional gift for singing about being a lost young man who's constantly making things more difficult for himself because he has no idea how to process any of the losses that he's felt. The shadow of Bryan's late mother hangs over his entire catalog. He can make fists-up anthems and tender acoustic breakdowns. His lyrics don't always work, but the most memorable ones really stick. His voice is absolutely spectacular — a barrel-chested bellow that projects wounded vulnerability even when he's not letting it crack in the quieter moments. As he's blown up, he's kept his sound relatively rough and ramshackle without ever going full experimental-pretentious. You could read his success as a rejection of media-trained celeb culture if you wanted, but at least some of it comes from Bryan being good at what he does.

But as good as he can be, Bryan has plenty of tendencies that keep him from being great. It's not that he doesn't stand for anything. I'm actually a little heartened by the full version of "Bad News," the song that became a talking point last year. On a snippet shared online, Bryan sang a lyric about "ICE is gonna come bust down your door," and when right-wing types started to object, he posted a mealy-mouthed statement about how he's not left-wing or right-wing and we all need to come together. "Bad News" is a love song, not a protest song, but it eloquently depicts a climate where everyone is increasingly resentful of the rich fucks who run everything: "The fading of the red, white, and blue/ I served eight years just to be told/ That nobody cares and land's all sold/ I got some bad news/ I woke up missing you." He's not turning into the Clash or anything, but that's real shit. I wish I liked the song itself better.

My big issue with Zach Bryan is that he makes too many songs and that too many of them just fade straight into the background. He releases a lot of music. After building a grassroots following while still serving in the Navy, Bryan broke out with 2022's American Heartbreak, the triple-album major-label debut that came out a few months after he got his honorable discharge. He released two more albums in the next two years, as well as tons of EPs and one-off singles. I found his last one, 2024's The Last Great American Bar Scene, to be straight-up boring, a diminishing-returns repeat cycle with a few big guest stars but nothing on the level of "Oklahoma Smokeshow" anywhere in sight.

Credit where it's due: Bryan made it through all of 2025 without releasing another full-length album. There were plenty more small-scale releases, and at least one of them, the Gabriella Rose duet "Madeline," grabbed me harder than anything on The Great American Bar Scene. But a week and a half into the new year, here comes Bryan with With Heaven On Top. Once again, the album is long as fuck: 78 minutes, 24 songs plus the now-traditional opening spoken-word bit. With Heaven On Top would just barely fit on a single CD. On the first few listens, I don't hear an "Oklahoma Smokeshow" here, either. I hear some good songs and some not-as-good songs. Maybe some of the good songs will reveal themselves to be great songs in time. But this is a Zach Bryan album. At this point, Zach Bryan albums feel pretty routine.

That doesn't mean that With Heaven On Top is exactly the same as every other Zach Bryan album. For one thing, he's cut it out with the guest stars and figured out that just because you can get Bruce Springsteen on a track doesn't mean that you should. On Instagram, Bryan says that he and his band recorded the LP "across three different houses in Oklahoma this winter." Some of the musicians on With Heaven On Top have credits on some big pop records, but the most famous non-Zach Bryan person on here is probably Heaven Schmitt from the not-remotely-famous New York indie band Grumpy, who sings on a couple of tracks. This time, however, there are more musicians involved. That's new.

These days, Bryan produces all of his own records, and he usually records them with the guys in his touring band rather than studio pros. On a bunch of the songs on With Heaven On Top, however, he layers in things like strings and horns. The sound is still completely homespun and anti-slick, but Bryan anticipated a backlash to that adjustment before the album came out. In an Instagram post yesterday, Bryan said that he'll release a completely solo-acoustic version of the LP on Monday. He doesn't sound too happy about what he assigned himself: "I’m assuming this record is just like all the other ones and there’s gonna be a billion people saying it’s over produced 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'm looking forward to the solo-acoustic version of With Heaven On Top. That's not because the real album is overproduced. It's not even close to being overproduced. It's just that the horns and strings don't usually bring the sense of life that I think they're supposed to bring. Zach Bryan's voice is the best thing on any Zach Bryan song, and the extra instrumentation here has a way of dulling its impact. The record's sound is always pleasant. I could have a perfectly decent time washing dishes while a randomly chosen 20-minute chunk of With Heaven On Top plays in the background. But the album has more than its share of forgettable midtempo chuggers, and I just can't lock in with most of those songs.

Bryan now must face the weird paradox of singing about life as a massively successful everyday bro. It's a problem that countless stars have faced over the years, and there's no rulebook for that. On With Heaven On Top, as with his last few records, Bryan sings about his conflicted feelings about his own success: "Why am I in Northwest Arkansas, playing shows to those who don’t care at all?" If I'd been at a Bryan show in Arkansas, I'd probably be offended. Bryan sings that he hopes he's "strong enough to handle this, fame and other corny shit." He sings about a woman telling him, "If you quit now, you'll let those greedy bastards win somehow." I believe that he's being genuine in those parts, but they take me out of it.

Maybe I'm just focusing on the wrong things. On the spoken intro, Bryan talks about envisioning all the people in the world as flowing streams, their joys and pains and experiences hopefully all flowing into the same gigantic ocean. It's a vision that starts when Bryan goes out drinking with an older guy in New York after buying that guy's house. I have trouble hearing the bit about the rivers and the streams because I'm like, "Wait, you bought a house in Manhattan? With multiple units? Are you a landlord now?" It's really not any different from wanting Bryan to become the leftist firebrand that he steadfastly refuses to become. That's probably a me problem.

There are already a bunch of gossip headlines about With Heaven On Top because it's Bryan's first album since his breakup with the Barstool YouTuber known as Brianna Chickenfry. After the breakup, she accused him of "emotional abuse" and claimed that he offered her millions to sign an NDA. Nobody looks great in the whole situation, and I'd probably be more bummed on Bryan's music if the main person driving the backlash wasn't the motherfucking Barstool Sports guy. The new album has a few pointed and eloquent breakup songs. I like the chorus from "Skin": "I'm taking a blade to my old tattoos/ I'm draining the blood between me and you/ I'm taking a blade to my own skin, and I ain't never touching yours again."

With Heaven On Top also has a bunch of love songs, and it has arrived just a few days after Bryan suddenly got married in Spain. Some of the love songs work. The downbeat, introspective "Plastic Cigarette" is an immediate highlight. Some of them actively put me off. The chorus of "Slicked Back" is some truly corny live-laugh-love bullshit: "When I get to hell or heaven, can I bring my girl?/ 'Cause she likes romance, good sex, music, and ruling the world." Bryan usually avoids that generic-ass verbiage, and I'm a little worried that he's one of these people who's just way better equipped to describe sadness than happiness. And even on the love songs, Bryan can't resist the urge to pit his new partner against his ex: "Used to know some folks who put it all online/ But you paint landscapes in the evening time." It's like: I am streaming this album on Apple Music right now, buddy. You put it all online, too. Stop acting like you don't.

But what the hell, man, I put it all online, too. It's a widespread affliction. Zach Bryan isn't the person I wish he was, but I'm not always the person I wish I was, either. The story of Zach Bryan's celebrity now has all these ancillary supporting characters, and I don't really care about all those people. I care whether Bryan can sing something that makes me feel something. He might not do that enough on With Heaven On Top, but he does it sometimes. By and large, the new LP's ballads are rock-solid. "DeAnn's Denim" is one more soul-crusher about Bryan's late mom, and while it might work the genes/jeans wordplay a little too hard, it still brings the heavy, cathartic beauty. "Cannonball" is a sendoff to a late friend, and I really hope that song doesn't sneak up on me and wreck my soul at some point where I'm out in public and have to keep my composure. "Skin" is way prettier and more tender than a nasty breakup song really has to be.

Even when the song isn't a full-on soul-constricting emotional triumph, I like the sonic environment of a Zach Bryan record. I like the muted pedal steels and the heavily-accented tremulous high notes and slightly abashed count-off starts that Bryan always includes. I like hanging out with someone who mentions cover versions of "Only The Good Die Young" and "Between The Bars" as lyrical shorthand, trusting us to understand the roles that those songs might play. Both inside and outside of his music, Bryan makes some decisions that drive me nuts. But he still makes pleasant and compelling and sometimes outright moving music. He might be a douchebag, and he might not. Either way, he just made another pretty good album.

With Heaven On Top is out now on Belting Bronco/Warner.