On his sprawling, searching sixth album ‘With Heaven on Top,’ Zach Bryan turns inward without shrinking, delivering a bruising, generous portrait of love, belief, and American life in flux – one that doesn’t offer answers so much as companionship for those still trying to feel their way forward.

Stream: ‘With Heaven on Top’ – Zach Bryan

There’s no easing into With Heaven on Top. It opens like a door already mid-swing, letting in a rush of memory, ache, and unease that feels impossible to shut out.

From the jump, Zach Bryan sounds less interested in making something tidy or palatable than he is in telling the truth as it exists right now – messy, overwhelming, unresolved. This is a sobering record, one that feels almost uncomfortably prescient, tracing a somber portrait of American life as 2025 gives way to 2026.

I’ve been out and I’ve been drinking,
why am I always thinking
‘Bout thing that really matter,
like twin towers and satellites?
Everyone I know got older,
told my drunk ass to get sober
Settle down and have some kids,
be content with all of it

What if I don’t want children
to grow up like their father?
Willing to stir shit up and start a fight,
give themself up an appetite

Why am I in Northwest Arkansas?
Playing shows to those who don’t care at all
With my money bloody, and my belt so tight
I work myself up an appetite

– “Appetite,” Zach Bryan

Released January 9, 2026 via Belting Bronco Records / Warner Records, With Heaven on Top is one hell of a way to start the new year. Zach Bryan’s sixth studio album arrives at a moment when he no longer needs to prove his voice – he only needs to decide how much of it he’s willing to give. Following the crossover eruption of 2022’s American Heartbreak, the intimacy and consolidation of 2023’s Zach Bryan, and the wide-lens Americana of 2024’s The Great American Bar Scene, Bryan now stands in a strange in-between – a songwriter whose audience has ballooned beyond genre or scene, even as his writing grows more inward, intricate, and charged. Where earlier records felt like discovery or declaration, With Heaven on Top feels heavier with awareness – of scale, of consequence, of the distance between private feeling and public life. It’s the sound of an artist reckoning not just with America or love or belief, but with what it means to keep telling the truth once everyone is listening.

At 25 songs, With Heaven On Top is a beast, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. These feel like first impressions of a record that actively resists being flattened into a single listen – it demands time, repeat plays, and a willingness to sit with its contradictions. Bryan remains, above all else, a storyteller, and a damn good one. There’s a sense that he gives very few f*s what anyone expects of him, choosing instead to make the music he feels compelled to make. Whether that’s projection or not, the conviction is undeniable: The album’s highs are as intense as its lows, swinging between radiant momentum and gut-punch stillness.

One of the most striking things about With Heaven On Top is how unafraid it is of sprawl. Bryan doesn’t streamline or edit himself down for convenience; instead, he lets the album unfold like a long drive with no set destination. Songs bleed into one another thematically, circling ideas of memory, masculinity, responsibility, regret, and inheritance. There’s a lived-in quality to the sequencing, where smaller moments sit comfortably beside larger declarations, as if to say that meaning is found just as often in the mundane as it is in the monumental. This isn’t an album chasing cohesion for cohesion’s sake – it’s documenting a life in motion.

Sonically, that sense of motion comes from variety rather than reinvention. The songs on With Heaven on Top are tonally distinct from one another, yet unmistakably part of the same world. Bryan introduces just enough diversity in instrumentation, tempo, and texture to let individual tracks develop their own identities over time – subtle shifts in rhythm, melody, and arrangement that reward repeat listens – while staying anchored to his core identifiers: plainspoken vocals, lived-in melodies, and an unvarnished emotional delivery. The result is an album that never collapses into sameness, even at its length. Each song feels like its own room, but all of them exist inside the same house.

The spoken-word opener “Down, Down, Stream” quietly sets the emotional temperature for everything that follows. Full of nostalgia and searching, it feels preoccupied with place, time, and the long, uneasy pursuit of meaning – a meditation on how life keeps moving whether we’re ready or not. That sense of drift and longing comes into devastating focus on “Bad News,” a song that’s already taken on a life of its own. Often referred to online as the “ICE song,” it stands as one of the album’s most stark and haunting moments – a brutally honest snapshot of American life in 2026. When Bryan sings “I got some bad news, the fading of the red, white and blue,” it lands like a punch to the chest, mourning the erosion of the American dream and the relentless cycle of fear, cruelty, and division that has come to define the present moment. His nod to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” only sharpens the sting – a reminder of what this country once promised, and how far it feels from that ideal now. It’s hard to escape the feeling that there’s bad news everywhere, every day, and no clear way to turn off the faucet.

This land’s your land
This land mine too
Is this all true, man?
Or is it just bad news?

Didn’t wake up dead or in jail
Some out-of-town boys been giving us hell
I got some bad news
The fading of the red, white and blue

On the more melodic and sweeping side, tracks like “Appetite,” “Say Why,” “Santa Fe,” and “Anyways” arrive as early standouts – dynamic, driving, and alive with grit and restless energy. They hit hard, not just emotionally, but physically – songs that move forward with purpose and bite. Elsewhere, “Skin” burns slower and deeper, a scathing, aching reckoning that churns through the wreckage of Bryan’s very public and bitter breakup and the ghosts that linger long after the flame has gone out. It’s raw, searing, and unflinching in the way Bryan does best – no distance, no insulation:

I’m taking a blade to my old tattoos
I’m draining the blood between me and you
I’m taking a blade to my own skin
And I ain’t never touching yours again
Yeah, I ain’t never touching yours again

And yet, for all its weight, the album doesn’t close in total darkness. The title track, “With Heaven on Top,” offers something like relief – not a solution, but a sliver of perspective. “You won’t find no answers safe at home / You can’t learn heartbreak from a poem,” Bryan sings, embracing the idea that life’s hardest lessons come from living them fully, painfully, honestly. It’s not naïve hope, but hard-won acceptance – a recognition that even when you go through hell, there might still be something worth holding onto on the other side.

A strong sense of place has always been central to Bryan’s writing, but here it feels heavier, more burdened by consequence.

Towns, roads, bars, coastlines, and living rooms become emotional markers rather than scenery. There’s nostalgia throughout, but it’s rarely comforting. Instead, it feels complicated – tied up with guilt, longing, and the uneasy awareness that you can’t go back, only carry things forward. Even when Bryan reaches for warmth or humor, there’s an undercurrent of exhaustion, like someone trying to remember what optimism felt like without fully trusting it anymore.

What makes the album resonate so deeply is that Bryan never positions himself above the mess he’s describing. He’s not preaching, absolving, or distancing himself from the chaos of the world around him. He places himself squarely inside it – flawed, confused, angry, tender, and searching. That humility gives the heavier moments their weight. When he confronts political decay, broken systems, or personal failure, it never feels theoretical. It feels lived. The discomfort is part of the point, and he refuses to sand it down into something easier to swallow.

The scale of With Heaven on Top feels deliberate, even generous. Rather than trimming ideas down to fit a cleaner frame, Bryan lets the record breathe, trusting listeners to meet it where it is and return to it over time. With Heaven on Top doesn’t just present a long tracklist; it insists on being lived with, revisited, and re-examined, resisting the idea that meaning should arrive quickly or cleanly. If its scope feels daunting at times, then that’s just part of its design.

That commitment to fullness only deepens with Bryan’s entirely acoustic counterpart With Heaven on Top (Acoustic), featuring stripped-down versions of every song alongside the full original album – 49 tracks in total. It’s a bold, almost defiant gesture, one that reframes the record not as a finished statement but as an open body of work, exposed from multiple angles. Where the studio album carries weight through scale and texture, the acoustic versions strip everything back to breath, phrasing, and bare intention, inviting listeners to hear the songs not as spectacle, but as confession. In that sense, the ambition isn’t just about how much Bryan gives, but how willing he is to lay it all out – twice – and let the songs stand on their own bones.

By the time With Heaven On Top reaches its final moments, the title begins to feel less like a promise and more like a question. What does it mean to keep going when faith in institutions, futures, and even ourselves feels fractured? Bryan doesn’t offer answers, but he does offer companionship. These songs sit with you in the uncertainty, acknowledging that survival itself can be an act of hope. In that way, the album doesn’t just reflect American life heading into 2026 – it challenges listeners to stay awake, stay feeling, and stay human inside it.

We’ll fight for our flags in some foreign place
While those greedy politician boys all rat race
Drive to California and surf the coast
Be known for cuttin’ up and cuttin’ shit too close
It’s a long hard day and a talk with dad
He was a heavy-footed boy in an ol’ fastback

You won’t find no answers safe at home
You can’t learn heartbreak from a poem
And every hard time, song rhyme, friend you’ve got
You’ll have, with Heaven on top
You’ll have, with Heaven on top

Ultimately, With Heaven on Top feels like a raw, unfiltered mirror held up to American life as it is and as it’s becoming – not polished, not flattering, but honest in a way that refuses to look away.

It absorbs contradiction without resolving it, allowing anger, grief, tenderness, and love to exist side by side. Bryan doesn’t attempt escape from the moment we’re in; he documents it, inhabits it, and asks what it means to keep moving through it with your eyes open.

It’s a bruising, exhausting, deeply human record, one that understands how heavy it can feel to stay engaged – with the country you live in, the people you love, and the version of yourself you’re still trying to recognize. If it sends a shiver down the spine or sparks a visceral reaction, that feels intentional, maybe even necessary. This is music that trusts discomfort as a form of connection, that believes feeling something – anything – is better than going numb.

For listeners who feel worn down rather than fired up, With Heaven on Top doesn’t promise clarity or closure. What it offers instead is companionship: The quiet reassurance that you’re not alone in your confusion, your care, or your uncertainty. And maybe that’s the point. In a time when belief feels fractured and hope feels conditional, the simple act of staying present, staying attentive, and staying human might be the closest thing we have to hope right now.

At the very least, it proves we’re still capable of feeling something, and maybe that’s the first step toward finding some kind of heaven on top after all.

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:: stream/purchase With Heaven on Top here ::

:: connect with Zach Bryan here ::

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With Heaven on Top

an album by Zach Bryan