In “The Great American Bar Scene” by Zach Bryan, the past is confusing, the future is scary, and Right Now is Miller Time

In just five years, Zach Bryan has transformed from cult-roots road warrior (2020s Elizabeth) to the rapidly rising defector of the neighboring country (2022 American Heartbreak) to Generation Z's #1 hit maker and storyteller in the voice of Generation Z (2023 Zac Bryan).

The men and women (mostly men) in his songs spend their twenties drinking their way through the alienating towns they've fled to from the small towns they've outgrown. They hang out in dive bars, break each other's hearts, bang High Lifes, pop Zyn, contemplate God, hang out, rediscover their rural accents, get younger and feel older than they really are. Boys and girls in America have these rad time together. So why do they spend all their free time remembering everything?

His feat The Great American Bar Scene, Bryan's fifth record, his magic trick, to quote one of his many guests, Bruce Springsteen, is to make it seem like the life he's singing about is still the one he's living. Since Bryan is a naturally gifted songwriter, the premise of his new album is as compelling as it is absurd: that America's most iron-clad rock star doesn't spend his time on airplanes and in hockey arena green rooms, but traversing dirty dives with the boys, losing money to Philly's sketchy bookies and staying up for the wee hours on friend's apartment roofs.

The way Bryan wrestles with this contrast – between his newfound success and the characters he writes about – and he struggles with it quite a bit – is to lean on the memories of a recent troubled past that's never far from his mind. . “Give me four minutes and a little time,” he sings on “Bass Boat,” another tune about his favorite subject: memory. “I'll make them my old friends.”

These 19 songs feel like a batch of old friends mostly because of Bryan's other magical gift: his ability to absorb and transform his many influences into something that feels uniquely his own. He emerged as the last decade's leading pop synthesizer in singer-songwriter, country-rock, indie-folk and heartland rock, combining his beloved Kings of Leon, Bon Iver, Turnpike Troubadours and Lumineers records into something that feels new. younger audience.

Say it Great Americana Bar Jukebox: the way Brian uses mournful National-like trumpets to build tension (“Oak Island”), the traces of the Lumineers book when he sings “cause I got you'” in falsetto (“Funny Man”). Throughout the record, he channels Tyler Childers' hero's ability to write in the rural language of his characters (see the album's glut of “they's” and “I's” and “you'se”). In “American Nights,” he turns the signifiers of brotherhood (Fords, tan lines) into noir, nebraska-tale with violence and PTSD. On “28,” he sets up a choral melody that evokes Jason Isbell in the cello melodrama of the Avett Brothers. On the ballad “Memphis? the Blues,” goes further, enlisting songwriting hero and fellow Okie John Moreland for a co-write and second verse. When, a few songs later, he enlists Springsteen himself for a duet, the song on which they trade lyrics (“Sandpaper”) is an homage to “I'm on Fire.”

But part of Bryan's astonishing commercial success may be that amid all that influence, his closest contemporary songwriter is Taylor Swift, whose sui generis worldbuilding Bryan almost always pulls for himself. Like Swift's recent work, it uses silence and space to turn otherwise sparse records into stadium anthems. And as a lyricist, he's absorbed Swift's knack for detail (a worn baseball glove, a rusted door hinge, a balled-up left fist).

The result is writing that combines lovable Kerouac cosplay, Instagram poetry, and Proustian profundity, sometimes from one line to the next, as in the last verse of “The Way Back.” “Pink Skies”, the album's lead single (featuring Watchhouse, else influence) is a masterclass in storytelling that deploys sparse images of grief and family to pack the emotional punch of a novel into four minutes. In one image, Bryan nails the flood of memories and emotions his protagonist faces building a childhood home while lamenting, “All the inches..scraping on the door frame/We all know you got to 4'1 in '08,” he sings .Brian is adept at letting bits of dialogue do the talking, as he does in “The Way Back,” the story of a mother and her wayward grown son: “He always sat under the oak tree/Sayin,” “My God I miss my old man.”

That Bryan's latest would be even stronger if it were four songs shorter is beside the point. Among the many methods he has absorbed from his pop contemporaries (Swift, Drake, Morgan Wallen, Bad Bunny, et al.) is the contemporary concept of the album as the Annual Content Dump. This title's cheerful grandeur is, unsurprisingly, a bait-and-switch: These are sad songs, small in scope and size (none run past four minutes). These are stories about estranged young adults who shoot the bull and trade memories over pool tables and forward bends to fend off and fuel a nostalgia they feel crushed before they turn 30. In The Great American Bar Scene, Brian shows his fans just how much of a storyteller he is: “I've always felt like I'm in the middle of something,” he sings on “28.” “Like home and somewhere far away.”