This probably makes me an unforgivable cliché, but my favourite artists have always been what you might call the great North American balladeers. The obvious ones — Dylan, Cohen, Springsteen — plus a few lesser-known masters: Warren Zevon, Tom Waits, Sixto Rodriguez, Phil Ochs and so on. I love their storytelling, their wistful all-American nostalgia.

The problem is that these are yesterday’s men. My father introduced me to several of them. Some are long dead. Others are just about still going and I have of course been to see them play, but it’s all rather retrospective, a rehearsal of tired genius. I have the musical taste of a 65-year-old man, but inhabit a 38-year-old’s body.

Which is why Zach Bryan is so thrilling. Bryan, 29, is an Oklahoman country rock music sensation who just filled Hyde Park for two nights. He has been making music since 2019 but only really took off in 2023, when he topped the Billboard 200 with his fourth album, Zach Bryan. Since then he’s released another hit album, The Great American Bar Scene, and a series of singles. Just this month he released a new single, River Washed Hair — one of his best yet. Zach Bryan is happening right now.

Bryan started writing as a teenager and began uploading songs to YouTube in 2017
LORNE THOMSON/GETTY IMAGES

I’m wary of being made to look a fool by history, but Bryan has a real shot at being his generation’s Springsteen. If this sounds absurd, at least Bruce agrees; the pair appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine last year for an “in conversation” piece, in which Springsteen told him that Bryan had already released “songs you’re gonna be singing till you’re old as me”.

Bryan may be a throwback to the raspy-throated greats of late-20th-century America, but he is also a product of his time and place. Born in Okinawa, Japan, a fourth-generation US navy brat, he spent eight years in the service himself, catching the end of the war on terror — something he reflects on in East Side of Sorrow: “Eighteen years old, full of hate, they shipped me off in a motorcade. They said, ‘Boy, you’re gonna fight a war. You don’t even know what you’re fighting for.’”

He started writing as a teenager and began uploading songs to YouTube in 2017. These attracted enough of an audience for him to make his first album in 2019 — named DeAnn after his mother, who had died three years earlier of illnesses relating to alcoholism. Many of his songs are laced with booze and pills and premature death. There are also references to his seemingly chaotic love life: he recently split up with the podcaster Brianna LaPaglia, who has claimed that he “emotionally abused” her. You get the sense things are messy behind the scenes.

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The song that first caught me was Burn, Burn, Burn. I was in the middle of a break-up, feeling anguished and adrift. Bryan’s raw, lyrical verses became a kind of lifeline. “So let me go down the line,” he sings. “I wanna feel it all, joy, pain and sky.” His blunt, honest wit sustained me in moments of deep solitude. His dissolute self-loathing spoke to my own: “My exes hate me and my friends all miss me, I wanna drown in rot-gut whiskey, leave this small town for a while …”

Bryan’s recent London gig was the first time I’d seen him live, which felt surprisingly high-stakes. What if it just didn’t land, the sound was off, or he struggled to dominate a big stage?

Zach Bryan fans at BST Hyde Park
ALAN WEST/HOGAN MEDIA/SHUTTERSTOCK

I knew from the first chord of the first song, Overtime, that it was all going to work. In fact, seeing Bryan on stage strangely reminded me of watching a young Wayne Rooney play football. There’s a physical resemblance — a stout, hulking presence offset by piercing blue eyes — but he also shares Rooney’s preternatural talent and naive sense of wonder at his own brilliance. Bryan is not the finished product yet — still a touch sentimental and clunky at times — but as a fan you wonder just how far this guy can go.

The Hyde Park crowd was cowboy kitsch, lots of moneyed Americans overseas and country-loving Londoners who might have seen Bryan on Yellowstone, Paramount’s preposterously successful show about ranching in Montana that helped to launch his career.

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But while Bryan is undeniably a country musician he also defies strict definition. He sings wistful country duets (I Remember Everything with Kacey Musgraves, the exquisite Hey Driver with the husband-and-wife duo War and Treaty), but also bouncy, rocky songs such as Motorcycle Drive Byand Quittin’ Time . Ballads such as Pink Skies and Something in the Orange sit ambiguously between Americana, country and folk. At the heart of it all is sincere storytelling.

On stage, he again shows the influence of Springsteen, with a sprawling band populated by old-timey banjo kooks, lissom Eurasian cello players and anarchic down-home trumpeters. His encore, Revival, played as the sun was setting in his eyes, was the best closing song I’ve seen, a bourbon-soaked bar-room epic that merited every one of its 15 or so minutes.

I walked out into the steamy London night humming Revival over and over to myself. The garish pedicabs waiting on Bayswater Road were playing the song too. Two weeks later I’m still humming it. Zach Bryan is reviving something I thought was stuck firmly in the past.