There would, on the surface, appear to be little common ground between the wife of stuffy old Malcolm Muggeridge and the latest bard of blue-collar America. Yet the unlikely ascendancy of Zach Bryan brings to mind Kitty Muggeridge’s killer putdown of David Frost as the superstar who ‘rose without a trace’.

You may be surprised to learn that Bryan, a 29-year-old US Navy veteran from Oklahoma, will headline two concerts later this year at Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium, as well as perform to 60,000 people each night in Edinburgh and Liverpool. He now ranks alongside Bon Jovi and Bruno Mars as a gold-star draw on the 2026 summer show circuit.

Bryan has never had a top 10 single or album in the UK, he gets next to no radio play, and I suspect he could walk the streets of London unmolested in his baseball cap and sleeveless T-shirt, yet he is a genuine musical phenomenon. Last year he played to a record-breaking crowd of 112,000 fans in the US. He is getting Champions League returns with an Isthmian League profile.

The numbers are indisputable. The matter of why Bryan’s music should have connected on a scale far surpassing that of similarly orientated artists, from Steve Earle and Ryan Adams to Jason Isbell, is less easy to determine. He can clearly write a song. The trouble is he tends to write the same one over and over again.

With Heaven On Top, his sixth album, runs to 25 tracks of rust-bucket Americana. His style is rooted in country music but lacks any of the bright crossover flourishes which have recently given the genre a mainstream renaissance. Each song is played straight and short, built around voice, acoustic guitar, pedal steel and huff-puff harmonica. The chords are basic, the melodies repetitive, the production simple.

Bryan ranks alongside Bon Jovi and Bruno Mars as a gold-star draw on the 2026 summer show circuit

Before the album came out, Bryan essentially apologised to fans for the fact that some songs this time feature – gasp! – horns and strings. He duly committed to releasing an alternative solo acoustic version lest anyone worry he was turning into Jeff Lynne. The album cover – picturing Bryan and a dog by a muddy waterhole in the woods – looks as though it has been uploaded direct from his iPhone. His entire operation is a determinedly no frills affair. Perhaps that’s the appeal.

Bryan has been compared to Bruce Springsteen, with whom he has collaborated, but while he shares some of Springsteen’s storytelling skillset he exhibits little of his verve and versatility, or his capacity for joy. He also has less to say. Released as a single last year, ‘Bad News’ seemed to take aim at Donald Trump’s masked and murderous ICE goons, only for Bryan to row back on any political controversy with a cravenly take-no-sides statement in the wake of criticism following its release.

Lyrically, Bryan has sad on tap. ‘I’m taking a blade to my old tattoos/ I’m draining the blood between me and you,’ he sings on ‘Skin’, one of the better tracks here, apparently referencing his messy break-up with a US sports podcaster called Brianna Chickenfry (Bryan has, perhaps inevitably, a ‘colourful’ personal life). Other couplets feel like parodies of the hard-knock school of songwriting: ‘Spend a night in jail after pissin’ off a cop/ Go through hell with heaven on top.’

Then again, you can see why Bryan mostly sticks to gloom. His few attempts at serving life sunny side up come out horribly scrambled. The chugging Tom Pettyish sleekness of ‘Slicked Back’ is hamstrung by a catastrophic lyric. ‘When I get to hell or heaven, can I bring my girl?’ he sings, ‘Cos she likes romance, good sex, music and ruling the world.’

And on it goes. ‘Sante Fe’ has a welcome skip in its step. ‘Appetite’ offers some appealing soulful swagger. Much of the rest is more or less indistinguishable. With a voice like a blunted blade Bryan purges square-shouldered self-loathing, dukes-up feistiness and endless reserves of male sadness. It amounts to a litany of woes: drinking, not drinking, trouble, bars, his dead mother, break-ups, new love, the city, the country. Listless lives, rolling on.

By track 19, ‘Always Willin’’, listening to the album feels like a kind of punishment. I want to grab Bryan by the lapels – probably not the wisest idea, looking at him – and tell him it isn’t compulsory for an artist to release every song he writes. Restraint can be a virtue; selection a craft in itself. But why would he listen? In 2026, this torrential river of misery is flooding stadia.