Jon Pardi - Honkytonk Hollywood

There is promise upon entering Jon Pardi’s Honkytonk Hollywood.

Strutting strings generate blinding neon light as a thundering rhythm quakes sawdust-laden hardwoods, the first goading notes of ‘Boots Off’ vowing a two-stepping good time. However, a few feet further into the star’s 17-track album and cracks are quickly revealed, the opening number just a gateway for a stream of mostly unremarkable songs to flow.

There’s the boisterous ‘Friday Night Heartbreaker’, whose grating talk-box flourishes aren’t quite loud enough to mask its painful predictability. Then, you have ‘She Gets to Drinking’, a lifeless waltz fueled by juvenile lyrics and dated themes. Those are soon rounded out by the sleepy ‘Gambling Man’, a song that, while unoffensive, doesn’t make up for the sins of the rest.

The fact of the matter is the 2020s have proven difficult for Pardi. The ‘Heartache on the Dancefloor’ artist has been unable to outrun the success of 2016’s California Sunrise and its follow-up, Heartache Medication, from 2019. Sure, Mr. Saturday Night was a fine release in 2022, but it didn’t touch the acclaim of his earlier works; and when his Luke Bryan-backed single, ‘Cowboys and Plowboys’, virtually flopped the following year, Pardi attempted to turn the page.

Enter Honkytonk Hollywood.

What is meant to be a reclamation of his status as hitmaker, the album – a supposed marriage between the high-octane rock and roll he’s been holding back and his signature Cali-country sound – finds him floundering. It’s difficult, in the end, to pinpoint any artistic evolution – or even who Pardi is over a decade into his career – through all the… stuff.

Every other song is either bogged down in excess – tracks like ‘Hard Knocks’ result in production-padded numbers that seem impossible to pull off in a live setting – or ripped from a decade-old pop-country script (‘She Drives Away’ and ‘He Went to Work’ feature nothing we haven’t heard before.), or both, like the heavily pushed ‘Last Call Thing’. Driven home by an ear-splitting fiddle and a soulless rhythm, the paint-by-numbers tune would have been a strong contender for Song of the Summer a few too many solstices ago.

There are album highlights, such as the weepy ‘Bar Room Blue’ or the hard-headed closer ‘I Kinda Wanna Keep It That Way’, but it’s simply too much of a journey to get to them.

Devoid of both the staunch authenticity and easy glamour of its namesakes, Honkytonk Hollywood feels relatively vacant, a mere shell of the world-colliding collection that was promised to listeners. If this writer were to find herself in such an establishment, she’d quickly make for the door.

4/10

Jon Pardi’s 2025 project, Honkytonk Hollywood, is available everywhere on April 11 via Capitol Records Nashville.

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