Ima take it slow just as fast as I can, purred wily country superstar Sam Hunt on his very silly 2017 smash hit Body Like a Back Road, and then, just to really drive the point home, he waited three full years to put that song on his new album. Yes, Southside, the hilariously long-awaited follow-up to Hunts cataclysmic 2014 debut Montevallo, finally came out Friday; yes, he fussed over this goddamn record for a solid half-decade, just to get everything absolutely perfect, only to release it [gestures futilely at recent world events] now. Amazing. You dont Google a song as old as Body Like a Back Road to remember when he put it outyou carbon-date it. That it sounds better now than it ever didstill pretty stupid, but winsome now in its flagrant naivetis a plot twist, kinda funny and kinda crushingly sad, and worthy of, yes, a country song.

Hunt, a Georgia native and minor college football star, is far from the first Nashville disruptor to try his hand at rapping, at oversharing, at charmingly arrogant self-actualization. (Think of him as the young zen quarterback, secure in his own immortality, who animates the lately rhapsodized Fountains of Wayne song All Kinds of Time.) But Montevallo, though familiar in its subject matter (see Break Up in a Small Town), crammed louche talk-sung verses into brash EDM-drop choruses (see Break Up in a Small Town again) and sounded like a revelation, a mainstream country landmark for a post-genre universe. I think about Hunts thing about the grass growing back on his front lawn where his ex used to park her car, like, once a week. (Same song.) Hes an everyman of almost superhuman vividness, and he was bound to turn the simple labor of putting out another album into a vaguely mystical and beyond-laborious ordeal.

Southside is 12 tracks and not quite 40 minutes long, and does not betray, from its hyper-casual cover shot on down, its status as probably the most anxiously awaited sophomore country album of Hunts generation. (The dogs not even looking at the camera.) Sometimes hes a staunch traditionalist: The albums very first line, a forlornly crooned Id put the whiskey back in the bottle, could be the first line of any country album released by anybody, ever. That song, 2016, is, like most of Hunts best songs, a tender and perceptive ode to romantic regret, sweet and remarkably apolitical given that its chorus expresses his desire to take 2016 and give it back to you. He sounds great, and reenergized, but not so much like a boundary-smashing iconoclast fixing to lead the revolution.

And then Hard to Forget happens. It kicks off with a sample of postwar honky-tonk giant Webb Pierces 1953 jam There Stands the Glass, chopping and stretching good ol Webbs nasal syllables as the brash beat kicks in, a feat of bumptious hick-hop sacrilege that powers, yes, a tender and perceptive ode to romantic regret. Got a bottle of whisky but Ive got no proof / That you showed up tonight in that dress just to mess with my head, Hunt quips in the chorus, a raucous house party raging all around him. Its all so simple, so ridiculous, so instantly indelible. This will be a fantastic summer song, my Ringer colleague Meg Schuster observed, if we still get a summer.

Like any early-2020 album served up by anybody, Southside was written and recorded (and frequently delayed) with no clue as to the tumultuous coronavirus-ravaged environment into which itd eventually be released. But Hunt knows a thing or two about inner tumult, about tenuous good times elucidated through gritted teeth, about pathos that feels communal even if its terribly specific to him. The narrative of this record, and really his whole career to date, revolves around his romantic partner, Hannah Lee Fowler: They split shortly before Montevallos release (its named after her hometown, and the split was his fault), and he spent much of the intervening years between that record and this one very publicly wooing her back. Southsides closing track Drinkin Too Muchwhich also dates to 2017, and in its moody solipsism is Hunts most Drake-like song amid fierce competitioncloses with this:

Hannah Lee, Im on my way to youNobody can love you like I doI dont know what Im gonna say to youBut I know there aint no wayI know there aint no wayNo there aint no way were through

Anyway, now theyre married. Repurposing this three-year-old, paralyzingly depressed jam as the albums dramatic conclusion is the most vulnerable sort of power move: See, I called my shot. Hunt, as you mightve guessed by now, has little use for chronological time. Drinkin Too Much is preceded by a clever and expertly lightweight anti-Instagram rant called Breaking Up Was Easy in the 90s; another moody and extra-bombastic breakup song, Downtowns Dead, is nearly two years old itself, and kicks off with Hunt singing, Thanks Hannah, thank you for coming back deep in the mix. Southside is the country-music equivalent of watching Memento, the narrative scrambled, our lovers torn apart or triumphantly reunited as the plot dictates.

Its all quite ambitious, even if the songs themselves are at their best when theyre at their humblest. Kinfolks and Downtowns Dead both have nimble and gigantic choruses that require no backstory; so does the melancholy Young Once, on which Hunt tosses off killer line after killer line that fully hits you only the 12th time you hear it. (Who knows how long were always gonna feel this way?) The woozy drum-machine backbeat mixes expertly with, yknow, the banjo on Let It Down. And if youre in it for the quote-unquote rapping, with Hunt somehow both at his bro-iest and most profound, then That Aint Beautiful is your jam, even if its mansplaining of the most mellifluous sort:

And you can split an AdderallWith a stranger in the bathroom stallSend a misspelled text to an exPut his fist through your bedroom wallCause bein treated like shitIs really comfortable to you

Sam Hunt songs are perspective-mangling magic tricks: Theyre reliably both not that deep and fathomless. Sinning With You is a sex jam that doubles as an alarmingly astute meditation on spirituality, and I feel as weird typing that as you do reading it, but sheesh: Your place or my place / His grace and your grace / Felt like the same thing to me probably wont take 12 repetitions to sink in. Southside is a huge deal in a monumentally casual way, and every track on it, however ancient it might be, is both deeply personal and totally perfect for general merriment and/or misery. Whether we get a summer this summer or not.

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Sam Hunts Southside Is a Big Deal, Even If Hes Casual About It - The Ringer