Zach Bryan introduces With Heaven on Top, his first album since mid-2024, with a spoken-word story of a Manhattan apartment in the winter, a fire, and the New York Fire Department dousing him with water that runs down his back, down the floor, and ultimately downstream and to the ocean.
The 25-track record finds Bryan, one of country music’s most successful and most polarizing figures, seeking to embody the person in that story. He dwells on the people and places that got him to the pinnacle, and the cost of life at the top.
Now that With Heaven on Top is out, fans and social media lurkers alike are working overtime to assess how successful Bryan was in his quest. Here are our five takeaways from the record to help move that process along.
Bryan lived life and wrote it all down.
After three years in the center of country music’s orbit, Bryan spent at least part of 2025 away from the spotlight. He played a limited number of stadium shows — plus a pair of blowout weekends in Dublin and London — but nothing like the schedule he kept during 2024’s Quittin’ Time Tour. He also sparred publicly with Gavin Adcock (not surprisingly) and John Moreland (quite surprisingly). But he spent a long stretch of time off the grid for the first time in his career, and just about all of With Heaven on Top came from it. He all but spells this out in “Anyways” as he laments the difference in his life between the summers of 2024 and 2025. The song speaks to burnout, frustration, and spending his time “underneath the covers, trying to hide from the world outside” before getting some advice: “If you quit now you let those greedy bastards win somehow.” By the end of the song, Bryan’s outlook has come around: “I ain’t feeling empty lately. I’m gonna go and make them scenes.” It’s hard not to hear this album as a collection of life experiences that led Bryan to such a turnabout.
In the mirror, Bryan sees the person we see.
The record is full of self-awareness on Bryan’s part, which is likely to intensify feelings toward him. People who like him are all but certain to like him more, and those who do not like Bryan are likely to come away liking him even less after a listen. There’s no moral to the stories he’s telling and no quest for personal growth (which aligns with his Adcock feud), but the person singing on With Heaven on Top matches up with the Zach Bryan the public did see in 2025. When he sings “I’ve been working on myself all fall. Six beers a week ain’t bad, a little boring is all,” in “Slicked Back,” he’s not singing about some abstract character. It’s him. When the album takes Bryan to New York time and again, he’s baring a soft spot for the Big Apple. And when he sings that he’s never been to Spain, he’s doing so from a plane bound for Spain. This has always been Bryan’s approach to songwriting, and to his credit, he doubled down.
It’s neither a breakup record nor a love story.
Fans and foes of Bryan alike who latched on to his public relationship with Brianna LaPaglia and its equally public, and tumultuous, ending will be largely disappointed in With Heaven on Top. Certainly, there are moments when Bryan picks at those wounds. “Skin,” in particular, is a veritable diss track referencing matching tattoos he and LaPaglia got as a couple, and taking a razor to his to remove it. Along the same lines, though, Bryan does not go overboard with tunes about his new love and wife, Samantha Leonard. But the lyric, “When I get to hell or heaven, can I bring my girl? ’Cause she likes romance, good sex, music and ruling the world,” still goes a long way toward covering those particular bases in Bryan’s life.
That ICE song, “Bad News,” is political, even if Bryan isn’t.
Bryan released a snippet of “Bad News” on social media in October. The lyric “ICE is gonna come bust down your door, try and build a house no one builds no more,” directly referenced the ongoing crackdown by the federal government and set off a fresh round of chatter over Bryan’s intentions. Bryan played it coy at the time, imploring people to wait until the entire song drops to make up their minds. Well, now that the song has dropped, it’s political. It would have been political in any week, but especially in a week in which the ICE he sang about shot and killed a citizen in Minneapolis. But it is also a reminder that singing about a political flashpoint does not make one political. Bryan is a Navy veteran, and that comes with its own set of frustrations, and he makes it clear, too, before getting back to his point that “right’s turned red, and the left’s all woke.”
This album is as country as Zach Bryan.
No single artist shoulders more credit for ushering in the era of stripped-down, lyrics-first country music than Bryan — or more blame for the endless debates over “authenticity” that followed. On first listen, With Heaven on Top is Bryan emphasizing musically and lyrically what got him to this point. If there’s anything new to the sound, it’s an obvious influence from Bruce Springsteen. This record takes Bryan’s acoustic medleys — and occasional waltzes — and adds just enough harmonica, horn, and string accompaniments to evoke the Boss without cribbing from him. And, for all of Bryan’s travels, his lyrics return him to his roots time and again. He sings about his late mother in “DeAnn’s Denim.” He sings about his Oklahoma home in roughly a quarter of the songs, name-checking Rogers County and the Red River, and references Oklahoma’s Turnpike Troubadours — one of Bryan’s favorite bands — in a passing mention of “Kansas City Southern” for those listening close enough to hear it.
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.
