In “Runny Eggs,” a song at the start of Zach Bryan’s new album, With Heaven on Top, our boy is out there living his best life in a place where you might not expect to find him — not chilling on a bass boat in some lake down South or crushing IPAs in a dive bar in Philly, but running with the bulls in Spain. Accompanied by his acoustic guitar and harmonica, he folds the experience into a Hollywood-ready montage travelogue that takes him from a road trip to California (“where the heartless are”) to a big night out in Brooklyn to a Colorado show in the snow in front of 10,000 fans, from memories of his family to conversations with God. The metaphoric significance is gloriously right there for the picking — those Euro-bulls aren’t too different from the ones they grow back home on the plains where he grew up. You can either ride ‘em or dodge ‘em or get run over. And isn’t it a hell of a lucky break that Pamplona just happens to rhyme with Oklahoma, where Bryan grew up? “But no matter where I go, I pray to always find home,” he assures himself. Sometimes this autobiographical cycle of life stuff really does almost write itself.
Being a brilliantly prodigious songwriter with a knack for deep meaning (i.e., a top-notch bullshitter) has made Bryan one of this decade’s runaway success stories. It wasn’t all that many years ago he was an ex-Navy guy playing covers in a Potbelly. Today, he’s a rock star and a passionately beloved poet of the people, filling stadiums with fans who sing along to every word of his vividly detailed, hugely relatable evocations of mistake-making and regret-stockpiling your way toward figuring out where you fit in the epic story of wet hot American heartbreak. His last LP, the 19-song The Great American Bar Scene, was a sweeping statement that felt like a culmination, led by a stunning single, “Pink Skies,” about packing up a childhood home while grieving a death and accepting the reality of impending adulthood even if your own wayward days are hardly a done deal.
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Bryan didn’t release a new album in 2025. Sitting down with Bruce Springsteen in an interview for Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians series, he told his songwriting hero, “It just feels like I put so much music out, people have read into it so much; but in reality, I was just writing music, and now I gotta slow down and home in.” In terms of real life, the 29-yard-old troubadour’s journey has continued at warp speed; in 2024, he went through a messy public breakup, then ended 2025 by getting sober and getting married. In terms of musically honing in? Mission accomplished. With Heaven on Top is a 25-song splurge — from high-protein Americana rock like “Sante Fe,” to fragile indie-folk poetry like “Cannonball,” from Mumford & Sons stomp to arty National-style horns and strings. He references an old Elliott Smith classic on “Anyways,” kicks an Elvis Presley impression on “Rivers and Creeks,” and taps some of Tyler Childers’ rural working-class angst on “Always Willin’.” It’s his most considered and accomplished album yet, so much so that he’s already preempted complaints that it’s “overproduced” by releasing an acoustic version.
Emotionally, Bryan is as raw as ever. “Skin” is an almost troublingly visceral breakup song, while the Tom Petty-steeped “Slicked Back” pays tribute to the grounding influence of his new wife (“used to know some folks who put it all online but you paint landscapes in the evening time”). “DeAnn’s Denim,” which adds to a canon of songs he’s written involving his late mother, intensely reckons with the good and bad side of generational inheritance. And if anyone is worried that Bryan has eased too smoothly into the pampered celeb lifestyle without a sense of alienation and guilt, spoiler: He’s kinda alienated and guilty. “Saying goodbye to who I used to be,” he sings, literally flying away from the flyover states on “Aeroplane.” On “Miles” he trashes his ex’s fancy friends then gets into the bummer of how it goes when you make a living turning your experiences into an exploitable commodity: “They’ve got miles of me on their radio.”
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Many songs lock into the more universal struggle of his recent decision to quit drinking. The fragilely pretty “Say Why” cleverly spins the image of giving in and buying a 40 ounce at an Ohio truck stop into a reckoning of Biblical proportion (he literally figuratively carries his cross to the bar). The sturdy soulful “Appetite” opines, “Everyone I know got older, told my drunk ass to get sober.” In that song he’s a musician cynically grinding through a podunk tour, “in Northwest Arkansas?/Playing shows to those who don’t care at all,” offering a nightmare scenario of what might befall an artist if their indulgences outstrip their dreams and goals.
Listening to 25 songs of one man’s stuff is about 10 too many, but Bryan can keep our attention because he’s good at writing genuinely open-hearted lyrics rooted in the hope that we can read our own story in his — whether you’re feeling disconnected from home or trying to cut down on nights out or just troubled by what’s on your phone, a feeling he taps into on the album’s politically charged “Bad News.” That song created controversy when it showed up online last year because its list of American ills included a line about ICE busting down your door. Arriving on an album released two days after an ICE agent shot and killed a mother of three in Minneapolis, it feels gut-wrenchingly present in a way that few songs have ever been. Bryan isn’t preaching to the choir here. As with Springsteen at the time of his anti-police brutality anthem “41 Shots,” he’s a pop star with a large number of Republicans in his core fan base. When the White House sent out a statement trashing the song last fall, they peppered it with references to other Bryan songs as if to remind him that culturally he’s one of them betraying the fold. They’ve got a point there. “Bad News” is a moment where the everyday people whose stories he’s channeling don’t look like him or most of the folks who pack his shows. Ironically, it might be the most all-American song he’s ever written.
