Morgan Wallen, the biggest artist working in country music today, doesn’t make much sense as a pop star—though that’s hardly stopped him from becoming one. The Tennessee-bred ex-landscaper has employed a sort of anti-charm offensive throughout his career, turning the drunken resentment of a breakup into his first big hit “Whiskey Glasses” and a real-life racial slur incident into the biggest crossover hit of this decade, “Last Night.” His first two records are the only albums ever to spend at least 100 weeks in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200; despite losing his season of The Voice, he’s still the only contestant in the history of the show to get a #1 hit (he has three). But as his profile has skyrocketed, his reputation hasn’t always kept up, and the party-boy tip of his early records has hardened into something more insular, couched in vague proto-populism. It works out nicely—there’s no cultural sector better suited to proletariat-friendly propaganda from billionaires than the Hot New Country charts.
His fourth studio record, I’m The Problem, finds him squarely, if half-heartedly, playing defense—not just of his own checkered career history, but the down-home, downtrodden lifestyle he’s carved it out from. In the late 1990s, when juggernauts like Garth Brooks, Toby Keith, and Brad Paisley still had their druthers, he might’ve had less to singlehandedly prove about country life and the kind of character it builds. In 2025, he’s famous enough to have all of the pressure and none of the peers. Like a buck in headlights, Wallen can’t seem to decide if he’s effusively rebranding or digging his heels into the dirt. I’m The Problem attempts to do both by courting the thoroughly modern algorithm of chart success: a tracklist that’s literally too big to fail.
The open secret of bloating soundtracks for scheme knows no genre, and the sheer heft of Morgan Wallen’s catalog puts nearly as much distance between him and peers like Luke Combs, Zach Bryan, and Chris Stapleton as the formidability of his success. But when it comes to the art of the confessional record, he’s at odds with his own project. For all the melodic polish and concision of his songs, which rarely broach the three-minute mark, Wallen’s albums read like brain dumps—several, ever-less-succinct drafts of the same “I’m not sorry” text, bobbing aimlessly across a boilerplate backbeat. Somehow, between 37 tracks and 49 songwriters (the most famous of which is Nickelback collaborator Joey Moi, who has producer credits on all of Wallen’s albums), Wallen has neither innovated his bedrock blend of Southern trap, pop country, and alt-rock nor revitalized the recipe that’s been churning out mega-hits since the ‘90s.
But Wallen has also never sounded more suited to his moment—a working-man’s millionaire with a .44 by his bedside and an empty rocks glass in his hand, storming off a New York stage to get to “God’s country.” Album opener and title track “I’m The Problem” immediately reestablishes the key connective tissue of Wallen’s last two records: whiskey, driving around a small town, and his exes. As the record unfurls, though, these images start looking more formulaic than totemic. He doesn’t feel familiar because he’s being all that vulnerable. He feels familiar because we’ve heard all of this before.
For each track with personal roots—the plinky, hometown rap-rock anthem “TN,” the letter to his young son, “Superman”—I’m The Problem has generic slices of filler that could belong to anyone: the overwrought Garden of Eden metaphor “Genesis,” and “Come Back as a Redneck,” the requisite, HARDY-assisted middle finger to urban snobs, which opens: “Hey, mister city man.” Even rompier, lighter fare like “LA Nights” or “20 Cigarettes” seem slightly stale amid a slew of sour-grapes songs like “Kiss Her in Front Of You,” “Where’d That Girl Go?,” and the needling “Lies, Lies, Lies.” (For what it’s worth, even ”20 Cigarettes” is both a clear and inferior rehash of the bossa-nova-inflected sound that buoyed Wallen’s unexpected 2021 hit “7 Summers.”)
The collaborators Wallen brings on the mic aren’t much of a refresh, either. “I Ain’t Coming Back” with Post Malone fizzles where prior single “I Had Some Help” earwormed; requisite passing-the-torch duets with Eric Church and HARDY give him a couple good harmonies to hum under, nothing more. An early Tate McRae feature on “What I Want” falters due to a key issue: They sound terrible together. Let me be clear, I love Wallen’s voice—the ragged edges of his higher octaves, the unforced twang of his lower register. But once another singer is in the room, the idiosyncrasies of his strongest instrument get lost—and with so many authors in the mix, so does his identity. The fact that Wallen’s stardom seems against so many unspoken laws of popularity—he doesn’t exactly exude stage presence—should beget, at the very least, a curious perspective. Beneath the boilerplate 808s, bloated runtime, and belabored metaphors, it’s buried. Who, exactly, is the problem again?
Sometimes, the overwhelming number of cooks in Morgan Wallen’s kitchen do land somewhere ingenious. On one end, there’s the uncharacteristically lush “Miami,” which tunes up a sample from Wallen’s hero Keith Whitley into a Frankensteined instrumental that sounds like a Soundwave joint blared through a staticky jukebox. Elsewhere, there’s the key entendre on twinkly strummer “Kick Myself,” a bleak cut where Wallen struggles to change his Crown Royale-soaked ways: “Did my best, but I just can’t kick myself.” Off the booze and “the Broadway” (the bustling Nashville strip where he was arrested last year after allegedly throwing a chair from the sixth story of the bar Chief’s), Wallen realizes that you are who you are, and not everyone will love it. Perhaps more crucially, he recognizes that he’s not actually so bothered by that.
It’s that landing he sticks on “I’m A Little Crazy,” the final song on I’m The Problem and a stripped-down conduit through which Wallen gets to, as he noted while debuting the track live at his Sand In My Boots festival in Alabama last weekend, “talk my shit.” Crooning over a sparse, lullaby-like refrain, Wallen paints a stark portrait of a very different kind of country night than the hazy sunsets and aw-shucks flirtation baked into early hits like “7 Summers.” Here, he’s screaming at the TV, drunk and mellowed off antidepressants. “I do it every night, but the news don’t change,” he laments. “Guess I’m a little crazy, but the world’s insane.”
As melodramatically self-flagellating as I’m The Problem can lean, the lasting sensation of the record is righteousness: of redneck pride, of rancor, of “Real America” exceptionalism. “You hate that when you look at me, you halfway see yourself,” he sings on “I’m The Problem”—it’s written as a stab at a lover, but could just as easily serve as a sneer towards those who’ve taken issue with his behavior, his stardom, or his sound. If he’s so unrelatable, why are this many people tuning in? Is he really so crazy, or is the world insane? Surly and shy in equal measure, Morgan Wallen is an unlikely candidate for superstardom. Right now, he’s likely this country’s most accurate representative.
Hattie Lindert has written for Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The Face, Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. She lives in Brooklyn.
