It’s a credit to Post’s charisma that choice lines from that single (“I been breakin’ my back just keeping up with the Joneses!” sings the man with more diamond-certified songs than any artist in history) don’t rankle as they should. Instead, the superstar’s shift to fun, low-stakes pop-country feels so right, you wonder why it took so long. The way Post tells it, Nashville was daunting to a guy accustomed to simply stepping in the booth—where does one even get a band? But last year, he began hosting Bud Light-fueled writing sessions with Music City’s heavy hitters: Luke Combs (of “Fast Car” cover fame), Ernest Keith Smith, Michael Hardy, Ashley Gorley, Charlie Handsome, James McNair. If you’ve ever scanned the credits of a Morgan Wallen record, you’ve seen most of these names. Theirs is the sound of the country charts, and by extension the charts at large, at a moment when the genre’s bigger than it’s been in decades.
What exactly is that sound? It’s smoother than the blustering bro-country of the 2010s, with sanded-down edges and aerodynamic verses that tumble pleasantly into hooks. These tricky little songs are powered by momentum, and yet they’re oddly wordy, overburdened by their “cleverness.” On the Luke Combs duet “Guy For That,” Post delivers a more colorful version of this formula than Wallen, void of aura, could ever hope for. “I got a guy to sight in my rifle/My mama’s new boyfriend rebinds bibles,” Post warbles winningly, setting up an A1 concept. He’s got a guy for everything, except the thing he really needs—to unbreak his ex’s heart. Wait, what? Under a bit of scrutiny, the whole thing comes apart. Would it go off nonetheless on a dive bar patio amidst a rousing game of cornhole? Buddy, you got that right.
You needn’t get too deep into the weeds of F-1 Trillion to sense that Post is shy about his place in country music in a way he never seemed to be in rap. Of the album’s 18 tracks, he handles three alone: a halfway-decent love song, a ballad for his daughter on her future wedding day, a synth-pop slow dance number (“What Don’t Belong To Me”) perhaps left off his last record and gussied up with pedal steel. The rest are duets with country’s luminaries, then and now. Where Beyoncé got an interlude, Post wrangles a true Dolly Parton collab on “Have The Heart,” a Texas two-stepper on which the 78-year-old icon introduces her verse: “Wanna hear somethin’ sssexy?” On “Losers,” a stomp-clap anthem for the demimonde dwellers (“Last callers, last chancers, 9-to-5ers, truckers, dancers”), Post borrows some pathos from Jelly Roll, the Tennessee rapper turned folk balladeer whose success on the CMT circuit paved the way for guys with face tattoos to be embraced by a fanbase famous for its gatekeeping.
