album review: 'southside' by sam hunt

This was not supposed to happen.

Now I understand that statement is vague, because when it comes to Sam Hunt and this album and even this review it could refer to a number of things, but I’m trying to look at the biggest and most positive possible picture here, maybe even from the perspective of someone who would call themselves a fan of Sam Hunt. Because I know people in that group, people who liked or even loved his 2014 debut album Montevallo, which did attract some critical praise and where even at that time he was not the worst of the bunch in bro-country. He seemed to have charisma, he was a proven songwriter in his ability to construct a hook, and with songs like ‘Cop Car’ he’d proven he could write a good song - and I want to lay this out plainly in that he had legitimate talent; if he had wanted a longterm career in Nashville, he probably could have had it.

That was 2014. We are now in 2020, and if I want to consider the prime example of waste in mainstream country, Sam Hunt is the poster child. Oh, I was prepared for the worst - in early 2017 with the release of ‘Drinkin’ Too Much’ and ‘Body Like A Back Road’, two songs you can argue are among the worst of the decade in any genre, I was prepared for Sam Hunt’s upcoming album to crush the competition and bring back the zombified corpse of trap-infused bro-country to ruin Nashville for another few years… but that didn’t happen. Yes, ‘Body Like A Back Road’ was dominant in 2017, but it didn’t really spark a trend or a revival of the sound or spawn other acts to leech off of its rampant idiocy. Instead Nashville took the snap beats and flimsy production and gave it to Dustin Lynch and Kane Brown and Russell Dickerson and the advent of the softer tones in boyfriend country, which might be milquetoast and treading into boy band territory and can occasionally sound really limp and embarrassing, but it wasn’t as glaringly incompetent and embarrassing as the worst of bro-country. More to the point, most of the “bros” either went back to their normal sound or actively got better - after a fashion, of course, but Cole Swindell and especially Thomas Rhett were able to move on; hell, I can argue that even Florida Georgia Line eked a few decent songs in their braying search for identity.

And Sam Hunt… he wasn’t even really part of the conversation. He kept pushing singles but they didn’t perform, not even close to the heights he had achieved in the mid-2010s, and nothing he was saying or doing outside of this was inspiring confidence. He claimed his next album would have elements that sounded like Tyler Childers… right after releasing ‘Downtown’s Dead’. Then there was the DUI incident in November of 2019, which I wouldn’t even bring up if it wasn’f for being nearly the only Sam Hunt news in between failed singles, and a really bad look in an industry town like Nashville! And the rumor mill was not helping matters - in summer 2017 Sam Hunt did an interview with The Boot that made it sound like he had no interest in releasing additional music, it just demanded too much work as a part of his life, so if you’re at MCA Nashville two and a half years later you’re probably tearing your hair out trying to find a way to get a functional album. And a lot of fans don’t tend to think of this as an industry - to move singles to the radio and promote an album and tour costs a lot of money, and if Sam Hunt’s attitude is ‘whatever, brah, I’ll do this at my own time’, and the singles aren’t working, you’re looking for ways to cut your losses and get him off the books… and that’s before the pandemic hits, which’ll likely force a delay of his tour and seriously cut back on the parties that served as his primary demo!

And this is where I piss some of you off and say this: you know who else is on MCA Nashville right now, beyond Jordan Davis and a few 90s legacy acts who aren’t high priorities, and who could have used that radio push over the past decade? Kacey Musgraves. Imagine if she got a quarter of the radio push Sam Hunt did on the label - and yes, I’m absolutely bitter about that, and I’ll explain why later on in the review, but let me make this clear: that’s not a factor in any knives coming out for Southside. For god’s sake, they packaged both ‘Drinkin’ Too Much’ and ‘Body Like A Backroad’ on this thing, along with every other failed single he’s had the past three years - again, this screams of a label cutting losses however they can to ship something vaguely sellable, so a base level of awful is built into the conversation already… so how low can we go?

Well folks… I’ll be honest, my first emotion after finishing this project was not rage or disappointment like with AJR or the Zac Brown Band, but sheer, dumbfounded shock. Again, I bring up the waste: how much money and manpower behind the scenes was spent in order to make this, and how much more will be spent to move it after release. The fact this was released at all in this state blows my mind, especially with the failures already to its name - hell, the only reason I’d argue this exists is sunk-cost fallacy and the desperate hope that juicing the numbers on iTunes will give him just enough traction to gaslight unsuspecting consumers that there’s something to this. And that left me with the sinking feeling of dread that not only was it likely to work, but opening the question of whether I should even cover it. I could have maintained my dignity and vetoed it from the schedule, or left it On The Pulse for a quick drive-by thrashing, but just like with Montevallo something gives me the uncanny feeling it’s going to get a pass from a lot of people, and if I can be the voice screaming to the contrary as the devil’s advocate… well, then get me a pitchfork because I’m about to start breathing fire. Let’s not mince words, Southside by Sam Hunt is not only considerably worse than Montevallo in downplaying his strengths and amplifying everything that makes him a nauseating presence in mainstream “country”, it’ll likely be one of the worst albums released in 2020. Not since Thomas Rhett’s Tangled Up has there been a worse bro-country-adjacent project, and this does not have an Ed Sheeran ripoff to save it.

But to be blunt, I’m still shocked this was shipped at all, an album as rife with obvious failure as this is - there are trap artists who churn out mixtapes and albums with a development time of weeks that sound better than this, and I can argue after a year of Lil Nas X and his push of country trap, this doesn’t even sound current - yes, even by the standards of a nebulous and questionable subgenre, Sam Hunt isn’t even doing it well! There are retreads making a similar sound in Nashville in third stringers like Dustin Lynch and Russell Dickerson who at least sound vaguely aware of the trend - nothing gives me the impression more that this was assembled in post than how badly the trap beats are mixed and blended and are about 2-3 years removed from where the genre is now, and isn’t a huge factor of Sam Hunt’s nebulous appeal is that he’s ‘pushing the sound forward’? You can argue that he’s at least trying to embrace more pedal steel and organic country textures, but when you have no sense of groove and all your percussion comes from a cheap drum machine, the clash creates a jarring sense of dissonance, not helped by Sam Hunt’s refusal to add any sense of warmth or texture to any organic pickup! That lingering sense of sourness was a big issue of why Montevallo curdled my stomach, but Southside is considerably worse and before we get to individual songs, we have to highlight how Sam Hunt’s delivery is somehow making all of this worse. His halting spoken word passing as rapping has always been embarrassing, but not only is it back, you get the distinctive impression he’s not even having any fun with it. I’d argue it almost falls into the uncanny valley for me, even with bro-country - he’s not warm or loose like Jake Owen, or trying to be sensitive like Thomas Rhett or Cole Swindell, or even trying for antisocial machismo that could have some smolder like Jason Aldean or Tyler Farr, and he sure as hell doesn’t have a flow or sense of groove comparable to Kane Brown. Instead, you can tell Sam Hunt is trying some of all of it and it leads to a turgid, generally unlikable presence that can’t even pull together a ‘House Party’ or ‘Leave The Night On’ or even a ‘Take Your TIme’ - yeah, they were all dumb and in the last case way more pushy than it should have been, but to their target audience I can hear the appeal.

Here? Honestly, I could just point at the mugging jackassery that is ‘Body Like A Back Road’ and repeat any number of the half-dozen rants I’ve made about that song over the years and highlight its conceptual failure as emblematic of the album… but the ugly truth is that it’s probably mid-tier on this horribly sequenced and even worse-produced album. Sam Hunt has gotten some leeway in the past because he’s tried to integrate more pedals steel and banjo into the mix on the vague assumption that makes it more ‘traditional’, but not if the pickups are produced and blended like boiled ass! Again, there’s no attempt to find a timbre in these tones that could match the weight and body of the beats Sam Hunt uses, or blending that could make, say, that sample of the 50s country song ‘There Stands The Glass’ by Webb Pierce work in the mix - there’s no real attempt to match the tempo or texture or take any real cue from how hip-hop and even country have handled samples for decades… instead it’s just ripped to shreds and grafted to an underweight trap beat that’s somehow worse than when Keith Urban grabbed a guitar lick from Merle Haggard on ‘Coming Home’! This isn’t drawing on tradition, this is chopping up bodies for a grist mill, and the ugly dissonance doesn’t match any attempted mood! And if we’re looking for the root of this album’s biggest problems, it comes in that dissonance - not only is the sound misshapen and badly mixed, the mood it creates is sour and turgid and it rarely matches the content… and when it does, you kind of wish it didn’t! And it doesn’t just stop there: I’ve talked about ‘Kinfolks’ and ‘Downtown’s Dead’ on Billboard BREAKDOWN but here they’re these galumping clunkers that sounds so strained and forced, and then there’s the vocal blending on ‘Young Once’ especially when it’s trying to be atmospheric and just sounds muddy, or how badly the banjo blends with the trap groove on ‘Let It Down’. Yes, there are moments where the pickups sound okay - ‘2016’ is a sleepy ballad to start off and the vocals are too close but the pedal steel and acoustic are okay, and I like the fiddle on ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’, but does that make up for how ugly the guitars sound on ‘Body Like A Back Road’, or how across all of these trap beats we don’t get a punchy groove or solid flow? Again, Sam Hunt has had years and countless examples to get this right, and how underweight and poorly chosen the hip-hop elements are smacks of non-effort. And again, all of the production credits are in-house - you could have found a dozen beatmakers on YouTube and Soundcloud that are making harder and more interesting production than this.

But let’s flip the script for a second and say maybe this is supposed to sound hideous to amplify the ugly stories and emotionality in a lot of the content - it means that hookup moments like ‘Kinfolks’ and ‘Body Like A Backroad’ and the ‘let’s get stupid and fuck each other as I cover your mouth so my parents don’t hear’ song ‘Young Once’ are out of the equation, but okay. Because if you go down that route, you can argue that this album has some consistency in being a completely miserable experience - Sam Hunt spends most of the album miserable and cranky, and maybe like Drake the point is to wallow in the bad taste TMI of it all. Here’s the problem: in the cases where Drake does this well - and these days, it’s few and far between - there’s a level of wit and self-awareness that comes with it, an ability to sell a mood and paint a picture that might not be balanced but is often more revealing of both him and the girls in question. Sam Hunt does not have anything close to that level of introspection and that means this project gets pushy and projecting very quickly. I said on Twitter that ‘Body Like A Back Road’ is midtier for this album and this the reason why: it’s at least tonally coherent and somewhat honest in what it is, a completely fucking stupid bro-country hookup song. Here even on the songs that approach being passable - which I’d argue are ‘2016’ and ‘Breaking Up Was Easier In The 90s’ - the attitudes leaking underneath are just noxious and there doesn’t seem to be much self-awareness or introspection on it, and there’s not even a real attempt to try and make any of the toxic appealing! ‘2016’, for instance, it wants to go to a year where he can win this girl back - why go back to 2016 of all years is a different point, but okay - but not only does the song have the ‘Crash My Party’ problem of sounding mournful for the fun he’s giving up, he wants to go back and make the lies he previously told come true… but they still were lies, dude, so this is the ‘healthy’ relationship you want to fix? Or take the slightly more detailed misery of ‘Breaking Up Was Easy In The 90s’, where he’s creeping her Instagram and he wants to convince himself that she’s more interested than she clearly is in him, with a healthy dose of Drake-esque concern-trolling…. but this is not a song that wants to show any accountability or even make the easy lay-up of referencing breakup songs in the 90s - he’s just a product of the modern generation…

But she clearly isn’t getting the same leeway or framing, and this is where Southside becomes repugnant - and again, it’s not just because there are plenty of songs where Sam Hunt comes across like a total asshole, but because he can’t make it interesting or compelling because for much of the album you can tell he doesn’t think he is! The song that’s already gotten the most scorn is ‘That Ain’t Beautiful’, where clearly some girl is trying to live the party, Instagram lifestyle with Sam Hunt scolding them on the hook saying ‘that ain’t beautiful’ and ‘you can do better’ - the song has this creepy Puritanical vibe that by the second seems to be judging this girl for attending a wild destination wedding and being a little reckless, but you put ‘Drinkin’ Too Much’, a song about your now current wife airing out all her business even though she asked you not to and yet that gets a pass? Or take ‘Hard To Forget’, where he’s convinced this girl had to be just egging him on to get back with her - playing ‘hard to forget’ - by dressing sexy at the same party and not picking her stuff from their apartment yet, even if the entire song has a weird pseudo-stalking vibe that gives me every reason in the world why she’s not coming near you! And then there’s the extended whining of ‘Let It Down’, where he’s pleading for one more night to ease his breaking heart, for her to hold her horses especially ‘lookin’ like that’, and I’m left asking why the hell would she give this guy even that? Or take ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’, which actually had a decent lyrical flip having him wish he meant something to her, because ‘nothing’ would last forever - until you read even a little deeper into the song and realize it’s a giant load of negging in how many things he still wishes she does and feels - the entire bridge wishes that she thought she was guilty or childish or stupid or lonely and wow, you’re a dick!

And once that sentiment becomes entrenched on multiple songs, it makes even moments trying for coherent melancholy like ‘Downtown’s Dead’ sound a lot worse, and the hookups get skeevy as all hell. I’ve already mentioned ‘Young Once’ and how that couldn’t manage its atmosphere to save its life, but the real low point is ‘Sinning With You’, which ramps up the projection of this girl being so pure that it never felt like sinning when they were hooking up. And I’m just going to quote lines from this song: ‘your body was baptized, so disenfranchised, I was your favourite confession’, ‘his grace and your grace felt like the same to me’, ‘pull me under your innocence’, ‘I know what it feels like crossin’ the line, but I never felt shame, never felt sorry, never felt guilty touching your body’, and finally, ‘if it’s so wrong, why does it feel so right’. And maybe it’s just me, but conflating your religious ecstasy with your orgasm when we’re very well aware of Sam Hunt’s characterization across this album, it raises a spectre of playing on religious tropes for exploitation of innocence, and when you match it with the entitlement of this album, that’s creepy and fucking gross.

But let’s circle back to that word ‘entitlement’, and why this album makes me angry not just at it, but the system behind it, which I’d argue is fair game because this album would not exist at all without that system. Because Nashville radio programmers and label executives have pushed a meritocracy narrative for decades, that if you’re good enough you can make it; most recently this came up when there was pushback against systemic change to get more women on the radio, with the argument of ‘well, if their music was better it’d get there’ - and it’s total fucking bullshit. This is a narrative that is built to enable exploitation of artists who are not as connected or knowledgeable, or who have seen through the system and won’t get in line, which is why Kacey Musgraves getting the equivalent of blackballed by Nashville radio is so goddamn galling. Right now she’s proven she’ll find a way, as have so many others in indie country, but if you want the blazing example of mainstream country hypocrisy, it’s Southside by Sam Hunt. No other album or artist in the modern era has been allowed to fail as many times as he has, both commercially and critically, and still have the support of his label and consistent promotion, for an album that he doesn’t sound like he wanted to make and came out as an undercooked, barely finished disaster across the board. This isn’t just mediocre or forgettable, it’s an album that is actively enabled to suck, but will sell just enough with the full force of promotion and catering to the worst of cultural biases that it’ll push back on people who call it out. In that way, even though Sam Hunt has expressed no political affiliation publically, it’s emblematic of this time and what guys like him have been actively enabled to get away with - and regardless of where you fall, that’s hypocritical and disgusting.

Now some of you will say, ‘well, that’s just the industry, that’s not fair to hold the art that only exists because of that industry to that standard, separate the art from the conditions where it was made even though it drips through and shades every element of it’… and while that conclusion is the height of intellectual dishonesty, I can consider Southside outside of that: when it’s not boring it’s infuriating, it wants to push the sound but doesn’t grasp how any component part works, the content is so emotionally incoherent in its framing I thought the dissonance had to be part of the point until you realize there was nothing close to that level of sophistication or effort, and it features some of the worst sequencing on any album I’ve ever reviewed. I’m not sure it’s the shrieking, once-in-a-decade concentrated migraine that was The Click by AJR, but at least AJR seemed to care. This is lazy, crass, manipulative as fuck, and doesn’t even serve its target audiences well - what girl wants to be described and gaslit like this, and what guy wants to identify with the sullen, self-obsessed dumbassery that this is? And as much as y’all wanted me to get angry and roast this, I just feel gross talking about any of it. And what’s so deeply uncomfortable about this is the knowledge that me saying this might not change anyone’s mind or change a system - one critic does not have that power. But what I can do is this: strong 1/10, avoid like the goddamn plague, but if you’ve stuck around this long and you’re looking for country this year that’s trying harder than this and could use all the attention… Little Big Town, Terry Allen, Brandy Clark, Caitlyn Smith, Gabe Lee, and Ashley McBryde could all use it. Leave Sam Hunt and Southside in the ditch.