Is country a lifestyle or an accessory? Depends on who you ask. Presently it’s fashionable to try and bridge that gap. Blue-state dwellers with email jobs are dressing up like duck hunters, donning Carhartt and Realtree camo to the warehouse rave or wine bar. Costumed as a rodeo queen, Beyoncé waved the stars and stripes on the cover of her country album earlier this spring. In the video for July’s “Tough,” Quavo rocked cutoffs and an A-frame, play-acting homestead fantasies with Lana Del Rey as she extolled the virtues of being tough as leather boots. Despite Spotify’s best efforts to fill any idle moment with “That’s that me espresso,” the song of the summer is Shaboozey’s country-fried flip of an old ringtone rap hit. “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” an ode to drowning your 9-to-5 sorrows with double shots of Jack, has spent the past five weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. Currently just behind it is “I Had Some Help,” another twangy drinkin’ anthem, this one by Morgan Wallen and Post Malone.
With frizzy braids, glazed eyes and a debut single called “White Iverson,” Post Malone emerged in 2015 as a reflection of the zeitgeist, echoing the slurry melodies of exquisitely medicated rappers. Post spent his teenage years in the Dallas suburbs, playing guitar in hardcore bands and rapping over bedroom beats. The 19-year-old’s first SoundCloud upload racked up a million plays in a month, though he looked a little goofy in the “White Iverson” video dabbing on the hood of a rented Rolls Royce. “I’m not a rapper,” he insisted in a 2016 profile, calling genre a restrictive, dated notion, but rappers were always saying things like that. A few months after his breakthrough, Post tweeted late one night: “WHEN I TURN 30 IM BECOMING A COUNTRY/FOLK SINGER.”
As it turns out, F-1 Trillion, Post Malone’s first country album, arrives early in his 29th year, born as he was on the 4th of July. The months prior unfolded like an elaborate debutante ball: In a pearl-snap shirt and bootcut jeans he made his Stagecoach premiere in April, introducing himself by his government name (Austin Richard Post) before a set of country covers heavy on ’90s hits. Emerging from the crowd at CMA Fest in June, he joined Wallen to perform their new duet—a song as rotely catchy as anything on the Tennessee titan’s One Thing at a Time, the biggest album of 2023. “Welcome to country music, Post Malone!” Blake Shelton crowed as the pair debuted “Pour Me a Drink,” F-1 Trillion’s second single, beaming at each other all the while. The song was nothing crazy—your standard fare on the redemptive powers of cracking a cold one—but Post looked as happy as you’d ever seen him, taking off his camo cap to accept the wild applause.
It’s a credit to Post’s charisma that choice lines from that single (“I been breakin’ my back just keeping up with the Joneses!” sings the man with more diamond-certified songs than any artist in history) don’t rankle as they should. Instead, the superstar’s shift to fun, low-stakes pop-country feels so right, you wonder why it took so long. The way Post tells it, Nashville was daunting to a guy accustomed to simply stepping in the booth—where does one even get a band? But last year, he began hosting Bud Light-fueled writing sessions with Music City’s heavy hitters: Luke Combs (of “Fast Car” cover fame), Ernest Keith Smith, Michael Hardy, Ashley Gorley, Charlie Handsome, James McNair. If you’ve ever scanned the credits of a Morgan Wallen record, you’ve seen most of these names. Theirs is the sound of the country charts, and by extension the charts at large, at a moment when the genre’s bigger than it’s been in decades.
What exactly is that sound? It’s smoother than the blustering bro-country of the 2010s, with sanded-down edges and aerodynamic verses that tumble pleasantly into hooks. These tricky little songs are powered by momentum, and yet they’re oddly wordy, overburdened by their “cleverness.” On the Luke Combs duet “Guy for That,” Post delivers a more colorful version of this formula than Wallen, void of aura, could ever hope for. “I got a guy to sight in my rifle/My mama’s new boyfriend rebinds bibles,” Post warbles winningly, setting up an A1 concept. He’s got a guy for everything, except the thing he really needs—to unbreak his ex’s heart. Wait, what? Under a bit of scrutiny, the whole thing comes apart. Would it go off nonetheless on a dive bar patio amidst a rousing game of cornhole? Buddy, you got that right.
You needn’t get too deep into the weeds of F-1 Trillion to sense that Post is shy about his place in country music in a way he never seemed to be in rap. Of the album’s 18 tracks, he handles three alone: a halfway-decent love song, a ballad for his daughter on her future wedding day, a synth-pop slow dance number (“What Don’t Belong To Me”) perhaps left off his last record and gussied up with pedal steel. The rest are duets with country’s luminaries, then and now. Where Beyoncé got an interlude, Post wrangles a true Dolly Parton collab on “Have the Heart,” a Texas two-stepper on which the 78-year-old icon introduces her verse: “Wanna hear somethin’ sssexy?” On “Losers,” a stomp-clap anthem for the demimonde dwellers (“Last callers, last chancers, 9-to-5ers, truckers, dancers”), Post borrows some pathos from Jelly Roll, the Tennessee rapper turned folk balladeer whose success on the CMT circuit paved the way for guys with face tattoos to be embraced by a fanbase famous for its gatekeeping.
In the late ’90s and 2000s Post’s dad worked as a wedding DJ, spinning the era’s sunny country hits into the rap and rock songs of the day. Post represents this era on F-1 Trillion’s bloated midsection, fitting right in on the Brad Paisley duet “Goes Without Saying,” a song that would be of a piece on CMT’s Top 20 countdown circa 2003 alongside Alan Jackson, Kenny Chesney, Brooks & Dunn. Same goes for the second Combs collab, “Missin’ You Like This,” and “Devil I’ve Been” with ERNEST, the singer-songwriter currently climbing the charts with his feature on Wallen’s “Cowgirls.” This is pleasant-enough music that asks little of the listener, ideal background noise for your barbecue or tailgate. The patterns of these duets quickly become familiar, and the space Post cedes to his collaborators feels more like a pulled punch than an act of generosity.
There’s enough proof here that Post has the voice, demeanor, and goodwill to easily ingratiate himself into the Nashville scene. But what does Post Malone’s version of a country song sound like? The pair of tracks that open F-1 Trillion give an idea. “I got fuck you money/Girl, c’mon and get you some,” Post drawls on “Wrong Ones,” dropping the blue-collar act and joining Tim McGraw for a roots rock ode to meeting iffy women in questionable bars. On “Finer Things,” he recruits Hank Williams Jr. for a portrait of an outlaw in 2024: a dripped-out hellraiser (“Platinum on my teeth, wagyu on my grill”) blasting Skynyrd from his souped-up pontoon. Between these songs emerges a character whose rakish charm is at the center of the Post Malone Venn diagram, connecting the sauced-up rapper, the hedonistic rockstar, the haute hillbilly. You might even call this character the most fully realized version of the artist who denied being a rapper in that 2016 profile—the artist who summed up what he liked about his favorite country artists as such: “They had swag.”
Fortune smiles on Post Malone, whose journey from SoundCloud rapper to honky-tonk hero mirrors the arc of the zeitgeist almost exactly. Was it destiny that brought him to the main stage of the country music renaissance, or a cunning 10-year plan? In either case, a listen to the new mgk and Jelly Roll collab, a cringy riff on a John Denver classic, is convincing-enough evidence that a successful crossover takes more than opportunism alone. Watch the way he outshines Wallen in the “I Had Some Help” video, oozing “I’d like to have a beer with that guy” energy. The lane for “biggest name in country” is wide open, if he wants it.
