The Daily Spin II
Zach Bryan | The Great American Bar Scene
Welcome back to the Daily Spin. For the uninitiated, this is the series in which I review an album every day of 2025.
As was the case two years ago, my favorite song from each album can be found at the playlist linked here.
Album: The Great American Bar Scene (2024)
Artist: Zach Bryan
Link:
For a guy who pretty regularly tops the charts as one of the few country artists to have successfully converted across genres to widespread commercial acclaim, Zach Bryan seems perfectly content to be ‘just another guy’ - a laid-back persona you might find in the corner of a bar with an apostrophe in the name coming from towns with silos on Main Street. It’s oxymoronic - becoming bigger than anybody else by making oneself smaller.
And yet, Bryan is clearly the best at it in the modern scene. I’m a pretty big fan of Tyler Childers, but the bluegrassier sound he evokes makes him at times less commercially appealing, and other acts like Colter Wall just haven’t had that same flow that makes Bryan the perfect statesman for this new revival of country.
Plenty of people have drawn parallels to Springsteen - and they’re definitely not wrong, strings of Nebraska leaking through into Bar Scene like water through a particularly holey sieve - but it doesn’t always carry that same raw evocation that Bryan’s earlier works did. In order to make an hour of music, you have to have an hour of lyrics, and this often requires some base calls to better days of yore with references that lack what placed Zach Bryan at the heart of stardom - his unrelenting specificity.
The fastball is still there, of course. He’s always been fantastic at painting his own misery and majesty in tandem, and on Bar Scene, it’s interwoven beautifully with other people’s stories in a way that makes it all fall together quite nicely.
At some point, though, you gotta wake up. Bar Scene is Zach Bryan making his claim towards the future of the genre - but you can’t have that and also be railing against the big dogs of country. Brother, you are the big dog.
Rating: 8/10
Best Tracks: Better Days, Pink Skies
Worst Tracks: Bass Boat