Fear of Flying – Grace Tyler Written By Aishwarya Rajan
In the age of romanticizing and meet-cutes, spotting a love interest across a crowded terminal is the kind of thing daydreamers may quietly wish for and likely read about. That is, unless you’re Grace Tyler. In her latest single, “Fear of Flying,” airports and planes do not represent escapism; they present problems. The fear she sings about isn’t turbulence, though, given the unsettling headlines surrounding aviation lately, nobody could blame her. It’s the possibility of coming face-to-face with someone who was once yours. There’s a step-by-step manual for situations involving an engine failure over the Atlantic or a door flying off its hinges, but not the anxiety she’s working through. It’s a feeling that speaks well into the overworking mind of a girl learning to move on. To narrate this story, Tyler plays with her phrasing, driving through tumbling phrases while at times slowing her enunciation as stair-cased melodies enter and exit. Her voice carries an achingly soft quality, a subtle twang surfacing gently as she reaches toward her higher registers, never straining, only aching. The 25-year-old delivers something that sounds less like a breakup song and more like a lullaby for anxiousness, where string arrangements lie beneath her harmonies and linger with them, long after the song has ended.
7.0
The Climb – Bailey Zimmerman Written By Adam Delahoussaye
The Miley Cyrus standout single from Hannah Montana: The Movie is in safe hands with an artist who not only understands the assignment but seems to be living out in real time more than a decade later. Bailey Zimmerman walks through life like a Disney Channel character already; zany, full of one-liners and laugh line moments, but never too much of a punchline that he can’t bring the room back down to Earth when he needs to. That analysis isn’t a jab at his personality or his artistry; it’s an affirmation that his take on maybe the flagship anthem of that brand feels like a perfect fit for who he is, where he came from, and where he’s headed. The singer always seems to shine when he can show off his range, which he does impressively well here as his rasp soars to heights that feel unbelievable in moments. The mix and production are manicured to Zimmerman’s style, inoffensive but shiny enough to really hammer home the bright-side point that the journey is the destination. There’s a lot that he can sell on his vocal ability alone, but Bailey Zimmerman’s best work comes out of what feels like a mix of lived experience and personal conviction. A ballad about overcoming struggles reflects that perfectly for him.
7.0
Masks Off – Jesse Welles Written By Adam Delahoussaye
For better or worse, Jesse Welles makes protest music for the vertical-video era. Short, mean-spirited, and in a frenzy to grab your attention with whatever Twitter topics of discourse he can scrape together. The concoction they get mixed into is usually just as bitter and lacking in direction as the sum of its parts. While the average scroller may see too much to get mad and lose attention on the outrage of the month, Welles squanders his advantage to dissect those themes by trying to group them all together and never arrives at any real conclusion in doing so, much less a productive one. “Masks Off” darts between incel cave dwellers and political assassinations. Still, the finger-pointing dissolves into a blur of skin as the singer wants to whip his cultural dominance from one direction to the other. “They think you’re so damn stupid, they think you’re so damn crazy,” he croaks on the chorus, ironic considering much of the energy Welles spends on the track is directed toward the most superficial, headline-skimmer hot topics for sale in the information economy. It feels like the anti-establishment crooner is cannibalizing himself, unsure of any issues that weren’t fed to him by an algorithm, but not naive enough to put that same strategy to use when grabbing SEO-friendly keywords he hopes will keep people’s thumbs in place just a half second longer. There’s plenty of notoriety to be garnered in spouting off on controversy, but Welles constantly fails at the hard work of analyzing its root causes. Maybe that’s because there’s no money to be made in actually fixing a broken system.
3.0
All Day – Ben Chapman Written By Joel Reuben Pauley
If you’ve seen him live, you’d likely agree that Ben Chapman is arguably one of the greatest performers in today’s country music scene, and his new song “All Day” transplants that energy into a streamable form. From his new album, Feet On Fire, the track is a perfect representation of the groove and flow that you’d experience at one of his Nashville-based “Peach Jam” concerts. The band’s intricate control over the dynamics makes for a fun experience, as they fluctuate between full swing and held back, maintaining a steadily pulsing rhythm that keeps listeners tapping their feet. Chapman is pretty clear with his intentions in “All Day,” with no subtlety, as he describes his desire for privacy with his lady of interest. Still, the second verse is slightly more descriptive with its imagery, describing silhouettes from moonlight in the hours before the rooster crows. With the tasteful mix of softly striking piano, perfectly punchy drums, and an array of different electric guitar sounds, this is not only a win for Ben Chapman, but also for Anderson East, who produced and performed on the song, as well. Along with his distinct rocking soulful sound, the use of words like “Doggone” makes the song feel more personal to him. Altogether, this is far from just another country song about the need to “get a room.”
8.1
Hurt Like That – Reba McEntire Written By Joel Reuben Pauley
In 2026, Reba McEntire is still making music that’s as good as the songs from her prime. While you may know her as one of the biggest legends in country music history, she still doesn’t get the credit she deserves for the music released in recent years. Produced by Dave Cobb, “Hurt Like That” feels like the beginning of a new era for Reba. The new track is genuinely heartbreaking, with every characteristic that the perfect sad country song deserves. The story follows Reba, our narrator, as she walks into a hotel room and finds her husband cheating on her. Slowly unfolding, there is enough vagueness to let this image develop fully in the final verse, when she sets her ring down and leaves. McEntire describes the “bitter kind of pain” that she feels as a stain on her past that haunts her in her sleep. Going so far as to recall the smell of her husband’s Stetson in the air, she paints a portrait of the vivid memories that scar her to this day. It’s easy to hear a gut-wrenching song like “Hurt Like That” and write it off as another fictional tale, conceived in a Nashville co-writing session, but this story is also one that many people can relate to. With much attention to detail, this release shows that Reba is still one of the greatest in her field, proving that she is worth every bit of the credit she receives.
8.9
Back to Ohio – Jonathan Peyton & Abigail Peyton Written By Noah Sneath
“Back to Ohio” is an earnest song that clearly draws on real emotional pain but fails to convey it sharply. It is a musical portrait of distant, broken figures, cleanly molded into a familiar shape. Peyton, an independent singer-songwriter from Woodstock, Georgia, has had an interesting life, including an experience in a religious cult. That chapter formed the basis of his 2024 album Nothing Here’s the Same, produced by Sadler Vaden of the 400 Unit. He has a deep well to draw from, and “Back to Ohio” reflects that. The song has a Neil Young quality to it, not just the reference to Ohio or the haunting harmonica solo like a ghost train in the distance. Peyton’s lyrics and vocal delivery have the intensity and fragility that made Young’s music draw light from deep darkness. There is a potentially very interesting story here, but it’s delivered via templated songwriting structures. The chorus follows a common pattern of speculative longing ( “I wondered, ‘Are you finally free?’”, “Are you closing down those bars wherever you go?”), well-worn territory in folk/Americana music and a choice that distances the songwriter from finding specificity in his own story. A song that begins with a promising guitar pattern never evolves into further exploration of the harmonic space. It’s clear that actual pain inspired this song, but it remains a personal story without personal details. And as a result, the emotional impact of “Back to Ohio” is ultimately tepid.
5.4
Last Summer – Hayden Coffman Written By Noah Sneath
Hayden Coffman’s “Last Summer” is a drink recipe that you see on the menu at a beachside bar in Florida and then immediately vomit in your mouth. Three parts beach country, two parts bubblegum rap, shaken with a dash of banjo? Repulsive. But then, after two pina coladas, you and your friends order it as a joke, and it’s actually delicious. You’ll feel horrible in 18 hours, but who cares? YOLO. Lyrically, this song is all over the place. Musically, it’s soaked in trap beats and autotune. You could be forgiven for assuming the album art was generated by AI. However! Like your lovable screw-up friend, sometimes a song that absolutely does not work can still be the catalyst for a fun time at the bar. This guilty pleasure anthem has an undeniably catchy melody, the perfect length for a beach country jam (two minutes, 33 seconds), and ultimately works as high-level nostalgia bait for fans old enough to remember a young Matthew Shafer learning turntables on the fly before hitting it big. Close enough. Welcome back, Uncle Kracker.
4.0
Bottle – Christian Parker Written By Noah Sneath
This song is not good. It’s the simplest way to interpret this painfully simple song. Simplicity itself is not a flaw, of course, particularly when it comes to country music (three chords and the truth, after all). But the best country records dealing with the oft-explored romantic relationship cowboys have with alcoholism do have an understated elegance to them. For a song about a man in a constant state of inebriation, “Bottle” is confusingly hurried and lyrically cramped. It plays more like a meth-induced fever than a booze-fueled blackout. Examine every corner of this record, and you’ll find it to be devoid of ambition. Lyrically, there are no clever turns, only Seuss-level rhymes. Melodically, we are straitjacketed to simple three-note descending patterns to build both the verse and chorus. Christian Parker is an Arkansas native who left Capitol Hill and a law degree behind to chase a country music career. He has spent the better part of three years working the Nashville honky-tonk circuit, releasing two albums, Debutante and Been There, Done That, and accumulating a modest following. Parker has proven in the past that he can write a good country song (and will likely write more). Unfortunately, “Bottle” is not one.
2.5
Darlin’ – Taylor Austin Dye Written By Noah Sneath
Like an inexperienced poker player, many bad country songs have a single tell, and thankfully for listeners, it can be spotted immediately. The tell is simple: a five-to-ten-second atmosphere-building intro made of heavily reverbed tones rather than melody or chord movement. It’s a shapeless, ghostly production choice designed to signal what kind of song is coming. Spoiler alert: it almost always precedes a melodramatic heartbreak, trauma-to-growth, or an “I’m damaged and don’t care” song. Slightly different every time, but this confounding production choice almost always makes you want to skip. Now, it is unfair to judge a song by the first few seconds, but Taylor Austin Dye’s “Darlin'” suffers from this trope and does not recover. When this song finally settles into the first verse, it adopts a pseudo-rap, call-and-response lyrical pattern that plods incessantly through the chorus. This listener’s only respite is met with grating musical interludes. “Darlin'” is drenched in the worst qualities of early 2000s rap-rock: phone-effect vocals, unimaginative guitar solos, melodramatic lyrics, and so much more. The only interesting thing about this song is the mental exercise of trying to understand why someone would make these production choices. Nearly everything about “Darlin'” is counter to what sells critically and commercially in 2026.
1.7
Every Single Summer – McCoy Moore Written By Noah Sneath
Do you hear that? That’s the sound of “Every Single Summer” being added to summer country playlists all over the country. McCoy Moore’s beach-country jam is a Chesney-meets-Mellencamp anthem that is wonderfully simple in its musical construction yet incredibly energizing and catchy. There is something incredibly inviting about the way this song opens. It could be the warm timbre of the acoustic guitars. It could be the tropical steel guitar. It could be the kick-plus-rimshot beat, but by the ten-second mark, it doesn’t matter because we are floating on the breeze, driving down to Key West with all-American summer anticipation pulsing through our veins. The straightforward chord progression underpinning this song is colored with gently clever lines that make you smile when you’re singing along. If you’ve been paying attention to country music this month, you know that beach country is back in a big way. Some contributions to the sub-genre do so with sophistication (ERNEST’s Deep Blue), others with callowness. McCoy Moore’s entry is somewhere in between. Not taking itself too seriously but still keeping one hand firmly on the wheel, “Every Single Summer” finds itself right in the emotional headspace where a beach country song should be.
8.2
Land – Tyler Hubbard Written By Max Buondonno
The concept of taking a word from the dictionary and turning it into a whole song seems never to escape Tyler Hubbard’s mind. It’s even more evident when he lazily follows the same pattern and winds up with a song so similar to other songs he’s put out that he doesn’t even realize he did it already. “Land,” the former FGL frontman’s latest single, follows the same concept and metaphorical theme as “Dirt,” a 2013 smash hit for his old band. Harping on every instance in life where the word “land” somehow fits into a sentence, Hubbard takes a much more dramatic approach with the track’s production, leaning heavily on a grand piano to drive home that, yes, this song is engineered to be emotional. Singing about land and its presence throughout your life certainly sounds like the kind of tribute you’d hear from a first-generation farmer-turned-country singer, except it’s by a guy who heralded the arrival of bro country and made millions on pop radio. The disconnect between Tyler and “Land” becomes evident in the annoyingly dramatized production and tiresome lyrical cliches, making it sound more like a forgettable B-side cut from a Luke Bryan album than anything that feels authentic to Hubbard. It’s a far cry from the soul and authenticity of some of Hubbard’s other solo cuts like “5 Foot 9,” which do feel more like they’re ripped from the pages of real life, not a random songwriter’s notepad like “Land” does.
4.0
One of Us – Chris Young feat. Shaylen Written By Max Buondonno
Songs like “One of Us” confirm two suspicions: there are label executives who haven’t heard a new country song in over 10 years, and Chris Young thinks no one else has, either. It’s the same old story with his latest single, a duet with Shaylen that explores the push and pull of a relationship on the rocks. How many times have you heard a male artist bring a female artist on a song to harp on heartbreak with the most lackluster production in the background? Chances are a million times, yet it doesn’t seem to faze Young whatsoever. He seems just as passionate about this song as he was about every other release in his career: blind to the rest of the world, not realizing his contemporary mainstream audience has moved on beyond radio tunes and glistening emotional ballads. There’s something to be said for Young’s vocals, which seem as strong as ever on this track. But it doesn’t hide the fact that this feels like if Groundhog Day weren’t a movie starring Bill Murray, but a weathering formula for a country song that either needs a fresh spin or to be put out to pasture.
3.2
She’s Wrong, She’s Right – Bryce Leatherwood Written By Aishwarya Rajan
An old jukebox can transport you to another time, and its appreciation feels all the more poignant as music across every genre continues to explore new and reimagined avenues while often forgetting the past. In Bryce Leatherwood’s newest single, his prose and bouncy rhythms achieve a nostalgic feeling. It’s one that is easy to appreciate in a country music atmosphere that rarely executes the joy of old twangy country this well. “She’s Wrong, She’s Right” tells a story that any man in a happy marriage very likely lives by. With ordinary everyman storytelling, listeners are taken back to the good days of the late 1990s and early 2000s country music scene, reminiscent of Brooks & Dunn or George Strait. It’s a playful, upbeat track with the groovy country beats of an electric guitar spearheading the storytelling of what it means to love a woman: validating that she’s always right. Supporting the boogie foundations of this track is a high-energy, rockabilly piano. Leatherwood presents a transformative piece of music that is sure to get anyone up and dancing.
7.2
