Get the latest gossip

Jelly Roll: Beautifully Broken review – country’s newest superstar grapples with fame and addiction

As the gravel-voiced singer achieves mainstream success, his music is moving further from his back-country roots – but the grit in his lyrics lifts it above standard pop fare

“Ain’t no climb that’s ever too steep,” he avers, “waters rise but they’re never too deep.” Equally, his lyrics occasionally hint at the odd tussle with impostor syndrome – “I don’t think I deserve the time of day” – but ultimately conclude that the good outweighs the bad: “These roads got their twists and turns,” he sings on Hey Mama, “but I damn sure love it.” It was an artistic environment vaguely adjacent to the country-rap scene depicted in a 2018 Rolling Stone feature: a largely hidden world of festivals held at Georgia mud bogs, where Maga politics predominate and CD sales outstrip Spotify figures because many fans live so rurally that their internet connections can’t handle streaming. The stuff about fame and Higher Than Heaven’s incongruous paean to marijuana notwithstanding, the vast majority of its tracks stick with the story of DeFord’s past struggles: there are songs called My Cross, What’s Wrong With Me, When the Drugs Don’t Work and I Am Not OK. Bedecked with strings or massed gospelly backing vocals, the musical climaxes occasionally suggest a new dawn, but the words are concerned with the darkness before it.

Get the Android app