Post Malone is Bringing Joy Back to Country Music

Ahead of embarking on his country music adventure in late 2023, Post Malone added one final bonus song to his AUSTIN album, which dropped earlier that year.

The track was titled ‘Joy’, a hazy, atmospheric pop offering that finds Posty personifying the titular emotion, as he struggles to break through the hollow hedonism he contends with for much of the record. The track ends with the critical line, “Pray for me, I don’t want to be miserable”.

Now, almost exactly one year on from the release of AUSTIN, Post Malone is gearing up to release his debut country album, F-1Trillion. He’s taken the genre by storm, earning the biggest Spotify streaming day of all time for a country song when he dropped the now-ubiquitous ‘I Had Some Help’ with Morgan Wallen. It’s a collaboration that has since been crowned Billboard’s official Song of the Summer, enjoying a six-week run atop the Hot 100.

High-profile link-ups with Blake Shelton and Luke Combs followed, before the full F-1Trillion tracklist was unveiled. It reads like a wishlist of the most lustrous country stars and Posty’s favourite contemporaries, ranging from legends like Dolly Parton, Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley, Hank Williams Jr. and Chris Stapleton to Billy Strings, Sierra Ferrell, ERNEST, HARDY and Jelly Roll.

Post Malone’s entry into the genre has been the industry’s dominating agenda of 2024, with each new song teaser and tidbit of information being greeted with a cacophony of excitement. When Beyoncé, Zayn, Lana Del Rey and even now Nick Jonas revealed their intentions to venture into country music, the announcements were met with widespread scepticism and reluctance. When Post Malone launched his country era, it was celebrated like the prodigal son returning home. After all, Posty was sharing grainy, lo-fi country covers long before he even had his artist-name, with the Texas native famously taking to Twitter back in 2015 to share, “WHEN I TURN 30 IM BECOMING A COUNTRY/FOLK SINGER”.

Post Malone’s long-standing love of the genre has undoubtedly played a pivotal part in his success since foraying into it. Every time the ‘Chemical’ hitmaker takes the stage to perform with a fellow country artist, he is grinning from ear to ear, and regardless of whether it’s Sierra Ferrell, Brad Paisley, Morgan Wallen or HARDY, he looks like a child who’s been brought up on-stage from the audience to get a front seat to watch his heroes play.

Every F-1Trillion single and music video is coloured by one unmistakable emotion:

Joy.

This is the key ingredient to Post Malone’s brand of country music. The irony, of course, is that, prior to 2024, Posty’s discography was inherently mournful, with colossal hits such as ‘Better Now’, ‘I Fall Apart’, ‘Feeling Whitney’ and ‘Goodbyes’ all following a despairing, lonely protagonist that numbs his pain through substances and sex. Post Malone’s secret weapon in the rap arena was his vulnerability, with the bearded crooner frequently opening up to Zane Lowe about his struggles with anxiety, self-doubt and an over-reliance on alcohol.

Even AUSTIN, which was notably lighter than its predecessor, Twelve Carat Toothache, was still packed with heartbreaking lyrics such as “I don't understand how you like me so much / 'Cause I don't like myself” and “Give me somethin', somethin' real / I would trade it all just to be at peace”. His last tour was called If Y’all Weren’t Here, I’d Be Crying, with Post Malone admitting to Alex Cooper on Call Her Daddy that he named it this because, sadly, it was true.

AUSTIN found Post Malone doubling-down on his feeling of being out-of-place in the glitzy, braggadocious rap and pop universe, and more broadly, a sense of unease with his celebrity status. On ‘Socialite’, he muses, “In LA they tell me my truck is stupid”, with a defiant motif of Posty’s custom F-150 Velociraptor plastered across the album’s packaging. You can’t help but feel Post Malone is using LA throughout AUSTIN as the face of materialism, fame and excess, while his truck stands as a symbol of a simple, rustic and distinctly country way of life. With rap and pop having dominated the charts since the turn of the century, in 2024 country has become the genre of anti-mainstream rebellion - a spirit Post Malone has been aligned with since his label-defying debut project, Stoney.

AUSTIN laid the foundation for F-1Trillion, with Post Malone experimenting with looser structures, acoustic instrumentation and the removal of a click-track for the first time in his career. Gone were the sleek, heavily produced trap anthems of Twelve Carat Toothache and beerbongs & bentleys, and in their place were delicate, ethereal indie-pop reflections.

The mood was still groggy and forlorn, but there were chinks of light filtering through, with flitting whispers of contentment and finding purpose interspersed between the lonely mornings and the wild nights.

Now, in his country era, Post Malone seems happier than ever before. He has a twinkle in his eye as he shirks the blame on ‘I Had Some Help’, ‘Guy For That’ is equally tongue-in-cheek while ‘Pour Me a Drink’ is a full-blown, unashamed 2010s country romp. He’s still singing about break-ups, but there’s an unmistakable sense of levity and playfulness that pervades each track. Even on the more intimate, revealing songs, such as ‘Yours’, a ballad that Posty penned for his daughter, there’s a newfound ambience of warmth and familiarity.

In a recent interview, Luke Combs shared his perception of Post Malone, “I mean, he's so nice. He's an unbelievable guy. You can't help but be happy around him, to be honest. He's just in such a great mood all the time - you know, at least when I'm around him, I'm sure he has his moments like everybody else. But he's just so welcoming to anyone and everyone”. Post Malone has always had the reputation of being one of the sweetest and most genuine guys in the music industry, but until now, that hasn’t really been reflected in his trap-leaning discography.

The beauty of this is, not only has country music seemingly brought joy to Post Malone, Post Malone has in turn brought joy back to country music. In recent years, the celebratory feel of 2000s and early 2010s country has been largely eschewed in favour of a Zach Bryan-esque template of sparse, inward-looking reflections on the hardships of life. It’s gritty, raw and lyrically-oriented, as opposed to being hook-centric, and this has spawned a catalogue of wonderfully vulnerable music that digs deeper than the often superficial, trope-laden Bro-country wave.

But at the same time, while the emergence of this brooding ‘Bloke-Folk’ movement has been positive in many ways, it also feels as though we lost some of the spark and the joviality that country music has always carried. George Strait knew how to deliver a gut-wrenching tear-jerker, with ‘The Chill of an Early Fall’ and ‘I Can Still Make Cheyenne’ among the saddest country songs in history, but he also wasn’t afraid to be a little silly and poke fun at himself on the likes of ‘All My Ex’s Live in Texas’ and the hilarious ‘Ocean Front Property’.

Not only is Posty helping to make country fun again, he’s also giving it a much more unified feel. Early 2020s country has been dogged by persistent fan-wars about artists not being ‘country’ enough, artists not writing enough of their own songs and artists being too ‘Nashville’. At times, it feels like you have to stay inside the battle-lines and choose between listening to Morgan Wallen’s hip-hop-textured blueprint or Zach Bryan’s folksy, acoustic sound - you can’t like both, only one of the two is ‘proper’ country, and both are often melancholic.

F-1Trillion throws all of this out of the window, with Post Malone taking the genre to the uber-mainstream with ‘I Had Some Help’ and ‘Guy For That’, before making you guess by joining forces with alt-Americana trailblazer Sierra Ferrell on ‘Never Love You Again’ and bluegrass phenom Billy Strings on ‘M-E-X-I-C-O’. He’s got both synth-driven beats and steel-soaked, traditionally-minded instrumentals, while he’s just as likely to cover Alan Jackson as he is Tyler Childers.

If modern country is judged to be divided and overly earnest, then perhaps we can view Post Malone’s recipe as ushering in a new era of Post-Modern Country, where joy is the secret spice and all ingredients are welcome in an eclectic, zesty and - most importantly of all - richly entertaining melting pot.

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