Rating: 2.5/5 stars

Country singer Zach Bryan’s self-titled album was released on Aug. 25, and despite the inclusion of features from multifarious stars of differing genres, it fails to break new sonic ground.

The 16-song album breaks the traditional flow of country and folk musicians in that it is Bryan’s fourth studio album plus one live album, rather than first, and despite the well-received wait for an eponymous album, fails to deliver anything new. The album’s lackluster performance is in part due to the tall order of following Bryan’s 34-song “American Heartbreak,” and represents an unsuccessful attempt to expand Bryan’s horizons.

In lieu of an astonishing catalog of new songs, the self-titled album transcends Bryan’s typical formula through the inclusion of a spoken word poem as the first track, and four featured artists, spanning from the well-known folk-rock band The Lumineers, (“BRIGHTSIDE”) to the recently-mainstream bluegrass Sierra Ferrell (“Long Time Coming”).

Bryan’s signature yearning for the Midwest is ever-present, as are the thematic settings of a summer’s end in “Summertime’s Close,” which simultaneously contends with the familiar topic of missing old, moved-away friends or loved ones. The song features a marked shift of acceptance of such changes as compared to previous albums, ending hopefully: “And tonight I’m dancing for two.”

While the amount of featured artists may carry the expectation of Bryan to deviate from easy-to-predict pop chord progressions and Oklahoma-themed crooning, the album somehow fails to move Bryan’s music in new directions or even include influences of said featured musicians. Track 8, “Holy Roller (feat. Sierra Ferrell)” fails to include any hint of Ferrell’s bluegrass background, and is only noteworthy in seeming to indicate a shift in Bryan’s lyrical content toward something slightly more profound than being sad, or being sad that one is not a cowboy, while still remaining wistful about the salient topic of making poor choices, “All the days, it all had to come, / And all the bad things that I’ve done.”

The same is true of The Lumineers’ contribution on “Spotless.” Instead of bringing their expected alternative-rock-inspired-folk sensibilities to the album, The Lumineers end up sounding neither like themselves nor exactly like Bryan; instead of the lyrical focus on emotional connections tied to physical places or seasons well within Bryan’s wheelhouse, the nebulous concept of being “spotless” takes center stage.

Despite the disappointing compositional usage of impressive featured musicians, Bryan’s penchant for writing catchy, profound songs has not disappeared; “Tourniquet” stands out as the album’s strongest contribution. It features a hopeful yet gentle piano hook before leaning into a confident ballad that is suddenly interrupted by a surprising interlude of background chatter at the 1 minute 13 second mark, adding a small avant-garde garnish to Bryan’s well-received country twang.

Though contending with the hard-to-beat shadow of Bryan’s previous work, “Zach Bryan” is left middling; the album does not quite fit the popular yet often predictable formula of Bryan’s work, but, to borrow a term from Taylor Swift fans, does not land on a definitively new “era” of Zach Bryan either.

Image from Warner Records via American Songwriter