Morgan Wallen: I’m the Problem album review — country superstar returns with a booze-soaked marathon

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Everything is bigger in America, including Morgan Wallen’s supersized albums. The country superstar’s latest is his biggest yet, clocking in at almost two hours. It is the musical equivalent of a double cab pick-up truck or octuple-stacked waffles. Its 37 tracks saunter at a mid-tempo pace, with twangy vocals that rise and fall like the Tennessee hill country in which Wallen was raised. He sings of manly trouble with women and whiskey. Welcome to the Morganosphere.

The singer is a huge name in his homeland. All 36 songs from his previous immense album, 2023’s One Thing at a Time, appeared in the US singles chart, breaking a record previously held by Drake. He’s controversial too. In 2021, he was filmed using a racial slur, for which he apologised. Last year, he was arrested after tossing a chair from the roof of a Nashville bar. He has never declared any political allegiance, but opponents depict him as a red-state jukebox. “Does being a Morgan Wallen fan make you Maga?” a Variety headline fretted when I’m the Problem came out.

“Oh, once you get to know me/I’m a coyote in a field of wolves,” he sings in “I’m a Little Crazy”. That’s to say, he’s a bad boy in a worse world. This persona of the fallible hero is well calibrated for the saints-and-sinners culture of country music. Wallen performs it fluently. He has an easy melodious voice, seeking to charm even as he expresses the desire to revenge himself on an ex (“Kiss Her in Front of You”) or drowns his misery following yet another break-up (“Drinking Till It Does”).#

We certainly get to know him over the course of this marathon album: far too well, in fact. “You say I’ll never change,” he complains in the title track to a lover who has ditched him, but she turns out to be correct. The musical dynamics hardly shift from their midrange setting. Repetitions pile up like the empty bottles in his lyrics. Booze is his “kryptonite” in “Superman”. Later on — much later — the same term is applied to the wild woman of “Crazy Eyes”.

Wallen is to country much as Drake was to rap in the 2010s. He has opened it up to other sounds, such as Latin pop in “Love Somebody”. But I’m the Problem smooths everything into uniformity. Its interminable run-time swaps flavour for bigness.

★★☆☆☆

‘I’m the Problem’ is released by Big Loud/Mercury