Some songwriters have a direct line from their open wounds to the pen on the page, and then there’s Zach Bryan. His 2019 self-produced, self-released debut album, DeAnn, was named after his mother, who died of complications related to alcoholism when Bryan was 20. Recorded during his time as an aviation ordnanceman in the Navy, its ragged songs detail grief and regret, devotion that leads to violence, family curses and hard-won redemption. Bryan’s passion and pathos garnered him a cult following that turned him into a stadium-filling superstar, and though he now records and travels with a full band—not to mention guest stars like Maggie Rogers, Bruce Springsteen, and the “Hawk Tuah” girl—his work still carries the stark intensity and emotional bareness of a heart-to-heart with a stranger after one too many beers.

His new album, The Great American Bar Scene, adds to the Zach Bryan formula by taking on a wider lens, weaving his personal struggles and triumphs into the greater legacy of lost souls and camaraderie found in America’s watering holes. This can lead to exciting new lyrical territory for him, like on “Oak Island,” a tightly wound character song about a railroad worker whose brother’s gotten into trouble with some boys from New Jersey. His protagonist, Mickey, also appears on the title track—this time as a nod to malt liquor—in a story that starts off with getting played by a bookie from Philly, winds through a police chase in Cheyenne, and ends with swaying to Johnny Cash with some sweet young thing under neon lights. In the background, you can hear the ambient sound of balls clanking in a game of pool, timed to the strums of the guitar.

It’s all very Nebraska, a comparison that’s hung over Bryan since his early lo-fi releases. He even tries to get ahead of the punchline here, with references to “State Trooper” and “Reason to Believe” and a duet with the Boss himself on “Sandpaper.” Ironically, the sound of Bar Scene is the most full-bodied of Bryan’s career, building upon the heartland rock that he explored in his 2022 major-label breakthrough American Heartbreak and the self-titled follow-up from last year. Bryan makes the kind of production choices here associated with someone gaining a lot more money and creative control in a short amount of time, deploying mariachi horns, gospel choirs and, yes, a John Mayer guitar solo to complete his vision. They mostly work, though maybe not surprisingly, Bryan’s folksier instincts shine the most: the moments of lonesome pedal steel and guitar-pickin’, the skilled harmonies with Noeline Hofmann on “Purple Gas,” and the showstopping harmonica on “Pink Skies.” That song, an account of DeAnn’s funeral, is so meticulously constructed that you can see exactly why, against all odds, it was picked as the album’s lead single.

Bryan has expressed stubbornness, even pride, in continuing to release albums that extend past an hour. While the drawn-out onslaught of emotions can set up a uniquely cathartic experience, it starts to wear thin on Bar Scene, where well-crafted tracks bump up against half-baked ghosts of past Bryan songs. “Bass Boat” sounds like an attempt at recapturing the magic of the two-part ballad “Jake’s Piano – Long Island” from last year, but apart from one particularly devastating line—“I was raised by a woman who was hardly impressed/And I carry that shit real deep in my chest”—it never quite reaches the same heights. Bryan sometimes trades jarring specificity for more general platitudes, such as, “Don’t get angry, listen to the sounds/Them good times will find their way back around,” on “Better Days.” Even when he gets into the details, he tends to lean on nostalgic signifiers—Beale Street and Elvis quotes, old Fords and Tom & Jerry, Trans-Am and Kodachrome—in place of more substantive meaning.

There have been many comparisons made between Bryan and Morgan Wallen, the other streaming giant of country music, unabashedly more conservative than Bryan but also a fan of long albums, wistful reminiscing, and authentic presentation. But there are arguably many more similarities between him and Tyler Childers, the Appalachian singer-songwriter whom Bryan shouts out on the very last line of Bar Scene, or Colter Wall, the gruff-voiced plainsman from Saskatchewan, whose song “Motorcycle” Bryan recently covered on his Instagram Story. All three of these men combine a reverence for country traditionalism with the outlaw attitude of the 1970s, to the extent where, when Bryan rails against “808s” infiltrating the country charts on “Bathwater,” it feels redundant.

But if artists like Bryan can match, or even surpass, the stardom of Nashville’s revolving door of country-pop singers, then what exactly is he rallying against? Bryan is now, reluctantly or not, the biggest crossover success in the industry, long past the point of being able to call himself an underdog. “I’m a mechanical bull, throw a quarter and watch me go,” he mutters, with a shrug, early on Bar Scene. You get the sense that, if given the chance, Bryan would fast-forward through all this “fame” business and become a barroom staple, with the kind of songs that people sing along to because their parents did. Only time will tell if he ever reaches that point; as Bryan would know, it takes a few decades to earn a permanent spot in the jukebox.