In the two decades (and some change) since Alan Jackson and George Strait cut the now-classic “Murder Down on Music Row”, the world of music discourse has descended into something like the world’s worst game of Clue. That is to say, everyone seems to be in the business of murdering: redditors accuse Soundcloud mumble rappers of killing hip-hop, a washed up Green Day blames Swedish songwriters and trap beats for killing rock, and if you’re to believe Youtube video essayists, pop music is on its death bed too. Country fans and country musicians, however, have been sounding the Code Blue for decades now.
Country fans and country musicians are probably the music world’s most prolific naysayers. I mean, AJ and King George even did us the courtesy of being specific: “the steel guitars no longer cry” and “the fiddles barely play.” But the fact of the matter is –– depending on who you ask –– country music has been simultaneously dead, dying, and coming back to life since the 80s. There’s simply no way for an artist to break into the mainstream without drawing criticism from someone or another.
Except for Zach Top. With a pristine tenor croon, first-rate tele-slinging chops, and an affable mustachioed grin you could bring home to your mama, Top may as well have been engineered in a lab to continue the neo-honky-tonking tradition of Alan Jackson, Randy Travis, and Keith Whitley. Entering 2025, the CMAs have nominated him for Best New Artist for the second year in a row, for good reason. The guy’s breakout success is pretty much textbook: between his massively successful 2024 debut Cold Beer and Country Music, a sold out North American tour, and a legion of TikTok fans, Top has reached commercial heights that neo-traditional country hasn’t seen in decades.
And all he had to do in 2025, was to do it again. Ain’t In it for my Health, a sophomore release is, well… sophomoric. The debut, Cold Beer, was a country call to arms: tunes like “Sounds Like the Radio” and the record’s title track laid out Top’s new-old manifesto for country music. Top’s original vision venerated simple pleasures amidst a world of complex problems, complete with a toe-tapping beat and stunning performances from Nashville session legends. Yet, Ain’t In It does not have a whole lot to add to this equation. Lead single “South of Sanity” is a solid cry-into-your-beer slow burn about getting broken up with over the phone, with Scotty Sanders commanding the sad machine (pedal steel guitar, for the uninitiated) to great effect. Pivoting to songs celebrating the positive aspects of Top’s life, we have “Guitar,” wherein Top’s acoustic goes head-to-head with session legend Brent Mason’s telecaster wizardry for a two-stepping good-timing rubble-rousing jam. I’ll give you three attempts to guess what the lyrics are about. But wait, there’s more! If Kenny Chesney ‘s tropical anthems made him Great Value Jimmy Buffett, Top might be the Trader Joe’s offshoot. “Good Times and Tan Lines” and “Flip-Flop” espouse the joys of fun in the sun and the sorrows of beach vacation breakups, respectively.
So, there you have it: getting dumped is hard, playing guitar is fun, and if you want a change of scenery, go to the beach. I enjoyed the record, and, strictly speaking, Ain’t in it for my Health is a good album. Furthermore, it’s absolutely the album that Zach Top should have put out at this stage in his career should he have wanted to stay the course. It is not, however, the album he could have put out. We now arrive at what I am inclined to call the Zach Top problem.
Zach Top’s music is absolutely the breath of fresh air that the country mainstream has desperately needed. However, Top now stands as the Nashville machine’s sole representative of neo-traditional country music, a style laid to the wayside since arguably the 90s. Top’s Great Leap Forward, then, is paradoxically a Great Leap Backward. If Cold Beer and Country Music was Top picking up where Alan Jackson and George Strait left off, then this new record could well have been an evolution of this style, catapulting the tradition into 2025, but it falls flat of its expectations.
And there lies the Zach Top Problem: how exactly do you iterate upon a style of music that attempts to recreate the past? If there has truly been a murder down on Music Row, how would one man go about bringing the dead corpse of “classic country” back to life, let alone in a way that it could stand on its own two feet in the 21st century? Nostalgia, unfortunately, has an expiration date. If Top is going to usher in a new era of commercial country music—and I hope he does—then he needs to decide the next step… and it cannot be backwards.
