Hardy Combines Country and “Country” on ‘Country! Country!’

Hardy’s tough to pin down. He’s the Woodstock ’99 of country hitmakers, someone who screams as many choruses as he sings, someone who is as likely to collaborate with Fred Durst as Lainey Wilson, someone Nickelback and boygenius agree on. He’s headlining Madison Square Garden even though most of his commercial success comes from the Number Ones he’s written for other artists like Morgan Wallen and Florida Georgia Line. He’s as likely to write a hit about chugging beers as he is to write a song about how he writes songs about chugging beers. He’s simultaneously the chest-thumping id of masculine country and a fun-house mirror poking fun at the whole enterprise.

To get a sense of his whole deal, look no further than the half-mocking, half-earnest title of his latest album, Country! Country!. In an era when country singers are forced to constantly redeclare their rural bona fides, Hardy has made a name for himself by tripling down on that premise with a wink (see his 2018 debut hit, “Rednecker”). The LP has a half-dozen tunes with the “country”’ in its title, including “Bro Country,” his pour-one-out elegy to the subgenre he helped crystallize.

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But underneath the surface, Country! Country! is, like much of Hardy’s work, surprising. There are some dark moments, including at least the full eight songs that find him contemplating his own burial or death. Those culminate in an album closer on which Hardy turns to his favorite subject: songwriting. “I got all these songs about dyin’,” he sings, “but it’s the only thing that everybody does.”

On the other hand, the radio-friendly “Luckiest Man Alive” is a reminder that, among other things, Hardy is a seasoned songwriter who seems like he can churn out hits in his sleep. But if that track is infectious, too often Hardy coasts on his own ability on paint-by-numbers tunes like “Favorite Country Song” and “Country in Me,” the latter of which sounds like a retread of Blake Shelton’s “God’s Country” (co-written by, you guessed it, Hardy). Is it more of the same or Music Row performance art? For Hardy, part of the point is to keep you guessing.

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