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Country music has a long-held tradition of narrative music, though the commercial side of the genre has strayed away from such character- and story-driven songs in recent years. Zach Bryan is here to change that, though, on his sprawling, ambitious triple album American Heartbreak. Across 34 tracks, the Navy veteran and cult favorite envisions bull riders, long-lost lovers, wandering road warriors, and more, telling their stories over simple arrangements and with an emotionally potent voice that recalls Tyler Childers or early Jason Isbell. “There’s plenty of characters on American Heartbreak—some of them I know, some of them I don’t,” Bryan tells Apple Music. “Sometimes I’m just in a breakfast place and I see someone doing something and I’m like, ‘It’d be crazy if that person was a bull rider.’ And then I’m like, ‘Oh wait—that would be a cool story.’”

Album highlights include the massively successful “Something in the Orange,” which crackles with brooding intrigue, and “From Austin,” a heartbreak song that avoids the tropes and clichés of similar country tracks in favor of more poetic lines like “Babe, I’ve gotta heal myself from the things I’ve never felt.”

Country songs celebrating the summer life are a dime a dozen, but few tackle the trials and tribulations of the season like Zach Bryan’s “Summertime Blues.” “Bet there’s some boys out in Okie that are praying to get the job done/Hauling hay and fighting off the sun,” the Oklahoma native sings, while also lamenting a lost love. Bryan’s refreshingly nuanced, unpredictable approach to country songwriting is all over Summertime Blues, as on the brooding blue-collar ode “Quittin’ Time” and the vividly rendered “Oklahoma Smokeshow.” Rounding out the project, West Virginia singer-songwriter Charles Wesley Godwin joins Bryan on another EP standout, “Jamie.” Arriving just months after Bryan’s major-label debut, 2022’s American Heartbreak, the EP is anything but a collection of cutting-room floor outtakes, instead showing even greater range from one of country’s more exciting young artists.

Zach Bryan has very quickly achieved Ubiquitous Pop-Mythology Origin Story status. The Oklahoma singer-songwriter’s trajectory, from Navy cadet with a preternatural talent for storytelling and a YouTube following to honorable dischargee with a massive grassroots following to, now, major-label superstar selling out 100 or so arenas a year, was both dizzyingly fast and seemingly preordained. His self-titled follow-up to 2022’s triple-LP Warners debut American Heartbreak doesn’t necessarily advance Bryan’s story or status so much as cement it, moving past the introduction phase into something more permanent and more meaningful. One way or another, Zach Bryan—and Zach Bryan—is going to be with us for a while.

The album—a lean 16 tracks compared to Heartbreak’s 34—begins with a double-barrel mission statement. The first is the spoken-word opening track, “Fear and Friday’s (Poem),” which distills Bryan’s everyman charm and philosophy into a benediction (“I think fear and Fridays got an awful lot in common/They are overdone and glorified and always leave you wanting”). This is followed immediately by a Hendrixesque “Star-Spangled Banner” guitar lick and the shout-along bravado of “Overtime,” complete with horn section and empowered nods to his aforementioned mythology: “They said I’s a wannabe cowboy from a cutthroat town/With tattooed skin and nobody around/Your songs sound the same, you’ll never make a name for yourself.”

Bryan’s three-year whirlwind of making a name for himself has only sharpened his eye for detail—the songs only sound the same in that they all share this quality. A slick turn of phrase like “If you need a tourniquet or if you want to turn and quit/Know that I’ll be by your side” is delivered like someone who knows what he’s doing. The songs comfortably inhabit traditional country, Americana, and, on relative barn burners like the veteran’s tale “East Side of Sorrow” and “Jake’s Piano - Long Island,” at least one boot in Springsteen-anthem story-song terrain.

And at a moment when country music, possibly more than any other genre, is roiled by reactionary entrenchment in the face of long-overdue advancement, Bryan has managed to stake himself to the center without alienating anyone or, chiefly, himself. He preaches love and tolerance and sings about hard drinking and ’88 Fords, and they don’t sound like opposing energies, because why should they? He goes toe-to-toe with Nashville-outsider kindred spirit Kacey Musgraves on “I Remember Everything,” and even the most intimate songs, like the solo acoustic closer “Oklahoman Son,” sound built for the back row, which gets further away each tour leg. The sum of these parts is nothing less than a confident, headstrong star turn from someone who seems a little ambivalent about stardom, at least on any terms other than his own.

Does Zach Bryan ever sleep? The wildly popular country singer-songwriter is also wildly prolific, dropping this surprise quintet of songs just weeks after releasing his massive self-titled album, itself coming on the heels of the string of loosies and EPs Bryan released in the year since blowing up with 2022’s American Heartbreak.

Boys of Faith opens with “Nine Ball,” a new song whose roots-rock production hews closely to Zach Bryan tracks like “Overtime” and “Fear and Friday’s.” The tune is also reminiscent of Jason Isbell, a major influence on Bryan—particularly Southeastern deep cut “Super 8,” with its devil-may-care attitude, and The Nashville Sound’s wistful “Last of My Kind.” Noah Kahan joins Bryan on “Sarah’s Place,” the “Stick Season” singer-songwriter lending harmony vocals and sounding like he’s having a great time doing it. Bryan teased the title track, a collaboration with Bon Iver, on social media in advance of Boys of Faith’s release, with the somewhat surprising pairing sounding like two sides of the same downtrodden coin.

While that collaboration may grab all the headlines, the EP also boasts a recorded version of “Deep Satin,” a fan favorite song of Bryan’s that many fans begged for after it didn’t make the tracklist on that self-titled LP. Its studio incarnation crackles with the same urgency found in the live versions floating around online, with gritty, off-the-cuff-sounding production to flesh it out. Bryan closes Boys of Faith with “Pain, Sweet, Pain,” another deserving unreleased tune getting the long-awaited studio treatment.

In the 313 days after Zach Bryan released his self-titled fourth album, he scored his first No. 1 single alongside Kacey Musgraves and headlined no fewer than 58 arenas, stadiums, and festivals, further cementing his legend as a self-made megastar whose ascendance looks, at least from the outside, like it’s skipped all the hard parts. And then, on the 314th day, he released The Great American Bar Scene, a 19-track follow-up that dispenses with any questions about his ability to remain almost laughably prolific as he’s learning how to adjust to it all in real time.

Like its immediate predecessor, The Great American Bar Scene opens with a spoken-word soliloquy about good fortune and good morals that burnishes the Oklahoman’s earnest, everybro cred, serving as a mission statement of sorts for the 18 songs that follow—and, really, for Bryan’s whole deal. At only 28, he is a master of nostalgia, bathing the libertine spirit of past generations and 2021 in the same sepia light.

Bryan’s grappling with his recent past isn’t just subtext; it’s in the songs. In “Northern Thunder,” a wistful slow-burn ballad characteristic of the album’s overall vibe, he’s still processing a mix of homesickness and shock: “And please don’t ask me how these last years went/Mama, I made a million dollars on accident/I was supposed to die a military man/Chest out too far with a drink in my hand/But I’ve got folks who like hearing me rhyme/I think of thunder under metal roofs all the time.”

“Like Ida” reaffirms his aversion to the Music City machine, even if the feeling isn’t mutual: “When you make it to Nashville you can tell from one hat tilt/That shit just ain’t my scene/I like out-of-tune guitars and taking jokes too far/And my bartenders extra damn mean.” This is Bryan’s great American bar scene: less shout-along rave-ups exhorting you to go out and get drunk than evocative meditations on your inalienable right, and frequent need, to go out and get drunk.

The title track is a barroom serenade that name-checks Springsteen’s spare, pitch-black Nebraska track “State Trooper”; “Sandpaper” pays off the reference with an appearance by Springsteen himself that plays like a heartland-rock Looper—a weathered elder meeting a younger version of himself who already has seen so much. (It also sounds more than a little like “I’m On Fire.”) And for all of Bryan’s humility, he’s self-aware enough to lean into the romance of his origin story and underdog status, numbers be damned—he is nothing if not an elite storyteller.