Appetite

Album: With Heaven on Top (2026)
Charted: 48 38
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Songfacts®:

  • This song finds Zach Bryan circling the tug-of-war between his wild, restless nature and the pressure to settle down into a domestic life. He wonders aloud whether he should ever have kids, worrying they might inherit his "appetite" for "stirring things up and starting a fight."
  • Fame looms over the song like bad weather. Bryan sings about playing to crowds that "don't care at all," a line that echoes the same unease that's crept through songs like "Burn, Burn Burn" where ego-filled crowds and the touring bubble feel more alienating.
  • "Appetite" appears as track 3 on Bryan's sixth album, With Heaven On Top, released January 9, 2026. Its themes land with extra weight given Bryan's very public year in 2025. In November, he spoke openly about suffering "earth-shattering panic attacks" amid online controversy, and in December he shared that he was nearly two months sober.
  • Bryan wrote and produced the track himself, handling lead vocals and lead electric guitar, and surrounding himself with a small orchestra rather than a bar band. The lineup includes:

    Background vocals: Heaven Schmitt and Keenan O'Meara
    Bass Zephyr Avalon
    Pedal steel guitar: Read Connolly
    Fiddle: Lucas Ruge-Jones,
    Drum: Nate Head
    Piano: Junior Carroll
    Tenor saxophone: Andy McCormick
    Trombone: Isaac Washam
    Trumpet: Austin Stunkard, Ryan Hatcher, William Werthimer
    Cello: Ana Monwah Lei, Sasha Ono
    Violin: Hannah Cohen,
    Viola: Samantha Uzbay
  • With Heaven On Top runs 25 tracks and was written, recorded, and produced entirely by Bryan across multiple houses in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the winter of 2025. Earlier records feel like notebooks from the road, but this one plays more like a long night indoors from someone sober, restless, and finally brave enough to ask whether the fire he's been feeding is still keeping him warm or just burning everything down.

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