Zach Bryan Soars on 25-Track Masterpiece With Heaven on Top
Zach Bryan Soars on 25-Track Masterpiece With Heaven on Top
Zach Bryan unveils a sprawling 25-track saga in With Heaven on Top, weaving heartbreak, faith, and hometown lore from California road trips to Oklahoma roots.
Zach Bryan returns with a sweeping new album, With Heaven on Top, a 25-track collection that expands his world and cements his status as one of country’s most ambitious storytellers. The project leans into big feelings, deep faith, and the messy reality of fame, with Bryan wrestling with everything from ICE to his messy recent past. The opening track, Runny Eggs, sets the tone with a vivid travelogue that finds him not on a bass boat or in a dive bar, but running with the bulls in Spain, a cinematic scene built around his acoustic guitar and harmonica. The metaphor isn’t just travel porn: it links the danger of the Spanish arena to the homegrown challenges of his Oklahoma upbringing.
From there, the album sweeps from a California road trip where the heartless are said to lurk, to a big night in Brooklyn, to a snowy Colorado show in front of 10,000 fans. It moves through memories of family and conversations with God, offering a portrait of a life lived in public and private at once. The bulls are a recurring image: you can ride them, dodge them, or get trampled — a reminder that not everything can be controlled, even for someone who makes a living telling precise, personal stories. And in the end, the refrain is a search for home. "Wherever I go, I pray to always find home," Bryan seems to sing across the record, an explicit throughline for a man who’s become a massively popular poet of the people.
The album follows The Great American Bar Scene, released in 2024, and comes on the heels of a year that included a much-discussed diss track about his exes and his new wife Samantha. Bryan is widely praised for his prodigious songwriting, his ability to turn heartbreak into anthems, and his willingness to expose his flaws in real-time. The new record includes the polarizing track Bad News in full, a move that longtime fans are parsing for what it signals about where his music might go next. Released as his sixth LP on January 9, this project continues a trajectory that has turned a Navy veteran into a stadium-filling artist and a much-loved voice for people figuring out where they fit in a modern heartbreak saga.
