Though country rock musician Zach Bryan hasn’t officially released his new single “Bad News,” the song has already become the subject of national controversy. Bryan—who started releasing albums in 2019, while he was still in the midst of an eight-year term in the Navy—has used his Instagram account to tease a song with lyrics that reference an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid. The song soon became a subject of conversation among conservative accounts on X, leading to negative attention from Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem.
“I hope he understands how completely disrespectful that song is, not just to law enforcement but to this country,” Noem said on a YouTube show hosted by conservative activist Benny Johnson. “To every single individual that has stood up and fought for our freedoms. He just compromised it all by putting out a product that attacks individuals who are just trying to make our streets safe.”
Bryan posted a live rendition of the song on July 12, following it with a snippet of a studio version on October 3. The lyrics describe an ICE raid, complete with apparent references to the construction jobs many undocumented workers hold:
I heard the cops came
Cocky motherf–kers, ain’t they?
And ICE is gonna come bust down your door
Try to build a house no one builds no more, but I got a telephone
The kids are all scared and all alone
The bar stopped bumping, the rock stopped rolling
The middle finger’s rising and it won’t stop showing
Got some bad news, the fading of the red, white, and blue
According to Google Trends, search interest was quiet for the early months of the song’s existence, before spiking dramatically on Monday. By Tuesday, the song’s lyrics were getting broader attention, perhaps thanks to Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs—who wrote about them on X, quoting a post from Pop Crave about Bryan’s song.
“Stick to Pink Skies, dude,” McLaughlin wrote, a reference to a song off Bryan’s 2024 album The Great American Bar Scene.
On Tuesday night, Bryan responded to the recent attention, claiming in his Instagram Stories that the song was not a reaction to recent events. “I wrote this song months ago,” he said. “This shows you how divisive a narrative can be when shoved down our throats through social media. This song is about how much I love this country and everyone in it more than anything.” He said that “hits on both sides of the aisle” would be apparent once the full song is released. “Left wing or right wing we’re all one bird and American,” he added. “To be clear I’m on neither of these radical sides.”
Bryan also broadened his comments to discuss the political climate in an era of “violence and heartbreak,” adding, “We need to find our way back. I served this country, I love this country and the song itself is about all of us coming out of this divided space. I wasn’t speaking as a politician or some greater-than-thou asshole, just a 29 year old man who is just as confused as everyone else.”
Though mainstream country music has long been intertwined with Republican politics—particularly since the height of the War on Terror—the current generation of country stars has a much more ideologically mixed record than outsiders might think. Donald Trump has made overt overtures to Nashville, giving Jason Aldean a prime spot at the Republican National Convention and tapping Carrie Underwood to perform at his inauguration—but many stars prefer to follow the tried and true Dolly Parton strategy of promoting patriotism over partisanship. (As Chris Stapleton put it in an interview with The Guardian last year, “I’m voting for America and a good glass of whiskey.”) Others have been more vocally liberal, like Taylor Swift, who made waves in 2018 by coming out against Tennessee Republican senatorial candidate Marsha Blackburn and subsequently endorsing Democratic presidential candidates. Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell, and Maren Morris all endorsed Kamala Harris last year as well.
Bryan is a grassroots phenomenon who got popular through unconventional channels, becoming a streaming juggernaut before he signed a major-label record deal. He decisively entered the mainstream in September 2023, when he got his first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and has proved himself hard to pin down politically. He writes songs about struggling Americans and, as a native of small-town Oklahoma, has a distinct red-state pedigree. At the same time, he’s a close friend of high-profile Democrat Bruce Springsteen—and in 2022, he told the New York Times that he didn’t like when his fans broke out into anti-Joe Biden chants. (In the same interview, Bryan described himself as a “total libertarian.”)
In his Tuesday statement, Bryan spoke about the difficulty of living in the public eye. “The last few months of my life I’ve been scrutinized by more people than I ever thought possible,” he said. “I feel like I’ve tried my hardest in so many ways, and it’s so hard to see where my bearings even are anymore. Been falling off a cliff while trying to grow wings at the same time.”
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