COUNTRY! COUNTRY! COUNTRY!

The Mississippi-born singer-songwriter dabbled in the sounds of heavy Southern rock on previous records like 2023’s the mockingbird & THE CROW and 2024’s Quit!!. But if you couldn’t tell from the title (or the fact that the word “country” appears seven times on the tracklist), the fourth album from HARDY is a country record—and don’t you forget it. As the hitmaker explained to Apple Music’s Ty Bentli, the title stems from comments he received over the years for his genre-bucking blend of country and rock. “In case you didn’t know what this is, this is what it is,” he says. “There’s a little bit of smartass in that, but it’s just part of who I am.” HARDY embraces his redneck roots on songs like “Bottomland”, an ode to his family’s deep history as outdoorsmen, and “Buck on the Wall”, inspired by a visit to his grandfather’s hunting cabin. (The latter first appeared on his May 2025 EP, titled—you guessed it—COUNTRY!.) On ERNEST duet “Bro Country”, the duo shrewdly comments on the genre’s evolution since HARDY cut his teeth in Nashville in the early 2010s. And on the title track, he rejects urban sprawl in favour of small-town simplicity: “If it was up to me, I’d make the whole damn country country.” Just past the exhortation of good old country livin’, a heavier theme lingers in the margins. “I know that if anybody listens to [the album] top-down, they’re going to think, ‘God, there’s a lot of songs about death,’” HARDY says. The fixation on mortality makes sense: While writing the album, he not only celebrated the birth of his first child but also lost his grandfather. Still, HARDY uses the potentially grim preoccupation as inspiration to live life to the fullest: “Let’s go to Paris, drink a beer on the roof/Hook up on some Ferris wheel and get matchin’ tattoos,” he sings on “Goodbye”. “It’s never a bad thing to remember that when you’re with the people that you love, one day you won’t be,” he explains. “You can channel that into a morbid thought, or you can channel that into a very positive mindset.”