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By Maxim Mower
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Morgan Wallen may have just treated us to a brand new surprise single, the haunting, heartbroken ‘Smile’, but it's safe to say the Tennessee megastar doesn't have the best track record when it comes to making fans wait after teasing an unreleased song.
In January 2023, for instance, we got teasers for ‘I Guess’ and ‘Redneck’, and one year on, both tracks are still nowhere to be seen. The demo for ‘I Guess’ undoubtedly received the better reaction, with fans still making new TikTok videos on a weekly basis calling for Morgan Wallen to drop the introspective, stripped-back offering.
‘Redneck’ was overshadowed by the explosion in popularity enjoyed by ‘I Guess’, but it nonetheless drew plaudits from a number of listeners for its comparatively experimental composition. The clip finds Morgan Wallen looking to his right at a red-light, and seeing an arrogant, suited-up city man driving a sports car, with Wallen reflecting on the new perspective he might gain if he was reborn as a redneck.
It's an interesting concept that features an undulating, synth-driven instrumental we haven't really seen from Morgan Wallen before, and despite not going anywhere near as viral as ‘I Guess’ or ‘Smile’, we're holding out hope that it will feature on Wallen's next studio album, which is expected to drop at some point in 2025.
Eagled-eyed fans have noticed, however, that Morgan Wallen has now deleted the ‘Redneck’ song snippet from social media, with the reasons behind this move currently unclear.
Sometimes, when they're about to drop a new song, artists will comb through their Instagram and TikTok pages and mute unreleased song teasers, as was the case shortly before Morgan Wallen made ‘Love Somebody’ available to stream in October 2024.
Similarly, when about to release a new album, artists might remove their unreleased demos from their socials as a way of drumming up hype ahead of the full project's arrival, so that fans can't listen to any of the forthcoming music before it drops.
Given the fact that numerous other unreleased snippets, such as ‘Since You Got Gone’ and ‘I Guess’, are still up on Morgan Wallen's social media, it doesn't seem he's deleted ‘Redneck’ for this reason. Similarly, he hasn't merely muted the video clip, he's fully removed it from his page, which doesn't suggest he's preparing to release it.
Unfortunately, the most likely reason for the ‘Last Night’ chart-topper's decision to delete ‘Redneck’ seems to be that he's no longer planning to include it on his new album. The logic behind sharing these snippets, after all, for Morgan Wallen to test the waters and gauge which songs to add to the tracklist based on fans’ reactions, and the ‘Redneck’ response was somewhat lukewarm when compared to the fervent buzz that surrounded the likes of ’Love Somebody’ and ‘Smile’.
We're hoping we're wrong, though, and that Morgan Wallen has perhaps just reworked ‘Redneck’ considerably since sharing that initial teaser, to the extent that the original demo doesn't really do the studio version justice anymore. This is a distinct possibility, given the fact that Wallen has been known to be a little trigger-happy when it comes to uploading unreleased snippets, with his infamous early ‘I Had Some Help’ teaser drawing flak from fans, before Post Malone shared the proper version later in 2024, before it blossomed into one of the biggest songs of the year.
Despite not going as instantly viral as some of his other tracks, ‘Redneck’ holds a lot of promise, both because of its innovative sound and its exploration of subject matter that deviates from the themes that pervade Morgan Wallen's latest releases.
When the country megastar dropped ‘Smile’ on New Year's Eve, we put forward our theory that the accompanying music video contains a hint as to Morgan Wallen's new album title - Dark Til Daylight. We suspect that, if this is indeed the name of the project, he could be constructing it as a double-album in the mould of 2021's Dangerous, with one half of the record consisting of melancholic songs such as ‘Lies, Lies, Lies’ and ‘Smile’, with the other taking on a more uptempo feel.
Perhaps this double-album concept hadn't been finalised when Morgan Wallen shared the ‘Redneck’ snippet in January 2023, and because it tackles neither heartbreak nor lighter, celebratory themes, it no longer fits into the new album's framework.
This is, of course, conjecture at this point, but Morgan Wallen's decision to delete ‘Redneck’ has not gone unnoticed, with numerous fans taking to socials to express their concern as to why the long-teased track has gone missing from Wallen's page.
We'll have to wait and see if we get a new, revamped ‘Redneck’ teaser in the coming weeks, but we'll certainly be keeping our fingers crossed the ‘Love Somebody’ singer-songwriter still intends to release the atmospheric track as part of his new studio album.
For more on Morgan Wallen, see below: