Since Bryan’s début, words haven’t stopped pouring from his mouth. His songs are propelled by idiomatic lyrics that sound as if they have been set to music only begrudgingly; many of his albums begin with a poem, as if to confirm that he has more verses than melodies to put them to. Last year, for the first time since 2021, there was no new Zach Bryan album, though fans still got a half-dozen new songs, along with a series of updates about his life. He carried on a public dispute with his ex-girlfriend Brianna LaPaglia, a podcaster, who had previously accused him of “narcissistic emotional abuse”; in the summer, footage emerged of him scaling a barbed-wire-topped fence in an apparent attempt to fight the country singer Gavin Adcock, who had accused him of phoniness; about two months after the incident, he announced, on Instagram, that he hadn’t had a drink in nearly two months, and suggested that he had been using alcohol to cope with “earth-shattering panic attacks”; on New Year’s Eve, in Spain, he got married, for the second time, and shared a video of himself singing Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest” at the reception.