It seems like the more melancholy Morgan Wallen becomes, the more successful he gets. In just a few short but smash-filled years, he has become the most prominent and committed miserablist in pop — the contemporary star most preoccupied with failure, and the most adept at turning it into something like beauty.
Unlike Drake, who is perhaps his closest analogue, Wallen almost never dwells on his successes. He forever lives in the space just beyond loving himself, and allowing himself to be loved. As a result, even his best and most engaging songs have a somber pallor hovering just over them.
On “I’m the Problem,” his moody and melodramatic fourth album, Wallen is almost unrelentingly despondent. Women are ruining him, and whiskey is rescuing him (by ruining him even further). Some representative moods: “I just wanna love somebody that don’t want me falling apart”; “Every square inch of this house is as messy as you left me”; “Too young to feel this old.”
It’s tragic, concerning and pointedly effective stuff: “I’m the Problem” is already on track to become one of the most commercially successful releases of the year. At 37 songs and almost two hours long, it’s a structural beast, a chart-clogging data dump. But rather than use that grand scale to explore different sonic approaches, Wallen largely digs in to several microtones of weariness.
“Kick Myself” laments the one thing an addict can’t ever escape: himself. “Just in Case” tells a story of never letting anyone get too close. “Jack and Jill,” a morbid song about a broken couple, recalls “Whiskey Lullaby,” the unbearably tragic Brad Paisley-Alison Krauss duet from 2004.
Songs like these are Wallen at his best — a quietly seething stoic who can’t let go of his gift for fluttering melody. Wallen is a fundamentally conservative singer (referring to aesthetics, not politics) in that he rarely pushes his voice past its comfort zone of lightly peeved terseness. That it’s so relentlessly tuneful is his greatest strength. On this album, his sonic palette borrows heavily from the pop-rock of the 1980s, which had an undercurrent of light menace cutting through its sensual schlock.
Wallen’s brokenness is effective — and to many, appealing — in part because of how it aligns with a career that has been pockmarked with self-inflicted personal wounds: his use of a racial slur in 2021; his reckless endangerment plea in 2024, after tossing a chair off the roof of a bar. Which is perhaps why even now, at the commercial peak of his career as a stadium-filling artist, Wallen still makes underdog music. He’s a superstar, but still in a kind of exile.
That gives the loneliness on this album added dimension. It’s both the product of his own choices, and of those who would judge him for those choices.
Occasionally, Wallen veers to another topic — say, the true-country literalism of “I’m a Little Crazy” — but what’s loudest by its absence is the sense of playfulness that defined his earliest releases. Wallen first emerged as a mulleted party boy making hip-hop-informed country, in the mold of Florida Georgia Line. On his first two albums, he helped anchor that style at the top of the country charts, not treating the association with rap music as a one-off dalliance, or a tastemaker assignment, but rather the logical endpoint of years of cross-genre flirtation.
That instinct flickers here and there on “I’m the Problem”: the pointedly rhythmic singing on “Don’t We,” the brazen attitude of “Where’d That Girl Go” or the leavened mood on a few songs toward the end of the album, particularly “Miami,” a hip-hop-inflected updating of Keith Whitley’s “Miami, My Amy” that’s begging for a Rick Ross remix. (That Wallen is remaking the Whitley classic at all is another level of provocation.)
Wallen is still insistent about how those roots remain central to his music. Last weekend, in Gulf Shores, Ala., he curated the Sand in My Boots music festival as a statement of taste — Southern rap stars like Moneybagg Yo and 2 Chainz alongside country stars like Riley Green and Hardy, with a Wallen performance to close it out.
In an interview on Theo Von’s podcast last month, Wallen suggested that his time as a genre hybridizer might be coming to a close, but that only means his templates have become open-source, free and available for a whole microgeneration of country singers to adopt for themselves.
In some cases, the most innovative takes are coming from the many tentacles of Wallen’s universe. Ernest, one of his go-to songwriters, is also a performer of cheeky, historically minded country with a contemporary spin on outlaw sensibility. His rollicking song “Gettin’ Gone,” an ode to the rarefied places just beyond the reach of sobriety, features Snoop Dogg, in a libertine tag team. In the video, filmed in Nashville, Snoop is a game visitor — rapping in a blues-like cadence, doing some air guitar, and blowing kisses out a car window riding down Broadway.
“Gettin’ Gone” is both a modern patchwork and a continuation of a decades-old tension in country between mischief and historical faithfulness. That the song is rooted in the structural rigor of the country music of the early 1980s — a time where flash and tradition found an uneasy alliance — is crucial to its charm.
By contrast, there’s nothing uneasy about the alliance on “All the Way,” the new collaboration between the molasses-mouthed Texas rapper BigXthaPlug and the young country belter Bailey Zimmerman. Musically, the song is indistinguishable from most modern country — a plangent guitar melody leading the way, followed by the sinister percussive drop of a trap beat. But Zimmerman largely serves as an accent piece here: “All the Way” is much more a showcase of BigXthaPlug’s calmly confident storytelling. (It’s been advertised as an early offering from a country-themed EP from the rapper.)
The true common ground here is slightly abstract: Dating back to the 1980s, Southern rap and Southern country largely occupied spaces that didn’t overlap, even if they shared accents and (sometimes) subject matter. The attitude, pacing and affect of the hip-hop coming from, especially, Houston and Atlanta created a distinct center of gravity that felt foreign both to the hip-hop emanating from the coasts and to the other Southern music of its day. On “All the Way,” hearing a rapper with such a lustrous Texas drawl sink into a song alongside one of country’s twangiest feels like a long-overdue reconciliation between worlds that once eyed each other warily (or, perhaps, with a touch of jealousy).
Of all the recent crop of country-rap collisions, Graham Barham’s “Oil Money” is the friskiest, and also the most directly indebted to early Wallen. A Louisiana singer with a boisterous and wry sense of humor, Barham treats this experiment — and it feels more like an experiment than a fully-formed identity — with a cavalier sense of play.
He’s singing and rapping about a woman just slightly more desirable than he is, and she herself straddles worlds, too: “She don’t need the drip or the whip or the Louboutin / She could look bougie with a Bottomland hoodie on.” It’s a classic country trope — a rural ruffian looking to see what life is like on the other side of the class divide. But Barham plays the role both for plaints and for boasts. He’s a player, and also a comic, and he’s holding down the party Wallen had to leave in the rear view.
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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