Zach Bryan With Heaven On Top 2LP

With Heaven on Top, Zach Bryan's sixth studio album, was written, recorded and produced by the Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Bryan now stands in a strange in-between – a songwriter whose audience has ballooned beyond genre or scene, even as his writing grows more inward, intricate, and charged. Where earlier records felt like discovery or declaration, With Heaven on Top feels heavier with awareness – of scale, of consequence, of the distance between private feeling and public life. It's the sound of an artist reckoning not just with America or love or belief, but with what it means to keep telling the truth once everyone is listening. At 25 songs, With Heaven On Top is a beast, and it doesn't pretend otherwise. These feel like first impressions of a record that actively resists being flattened into a single listen – it demands time, repeat plays, and a willingness to sit with its contradictions. Bryan remains, above all else, a storyteller, and a damn good one.

The sound shuttles between Tom Petty-esque Americana and more traditional country spheres, forever conjuring visions of those Oklahoma plains. 'Appetite' may have a rock crunch but it remains identifiably country, with Nashville legacies running through its veins; 'Say Why' may sit as a more straight-ahead songwriter vein, but skip two songs and 'Santa Fe' is a glorious, mandolin soaked Southern feast. If there's a through thread here, it's Zach Bryan's commitment to story-telling. There's a neat narrative flourish to lyrics, something that pulls you in at every turn.

There's an undercurrent of fear in With Heaven on Top: a hoarding of memories, the anxiety that exes and friends and even old dogs could soon be forgotten. Does that sound dark? Because With Heaven on Top is an album made for the light, full of sunny drives through the desert and cozy nighttime fires. The darkness creeps in through the lyrics, like shadows cast by big, beautiful chords... Like his antecedent, Neil Young, Bryan's songs can seem to run together at first, and variety might only reveal itself after a couple of listens. But despite all of that, his musicality (and band) continue to evolve. Compared even to his last album, With Heaven on Top has more backing vocals and a lot more horns, as his group inches ever-closer to the E Street Band. Bruce Springsteen's influence is undeniable, and while Bryan never quite dips into anthemic rock and roll, similar compositional ideas add welcome color to his country palette.