HARDY’s new album Country! Country!, out today (Sept. 26) on Big Loud Records, gives fans a potent reminder that his recent rock tilt hasn’t erased his country bona fides in the slightest. This is, after all, the same artist who saw one of his earliest successes with a swaggering, tongue-in-cheek anthem called “Rednecker.”

Across the past decade, HARDY has become one of Nashville’s most prolific, versatile voices, a songwriter and artist who can put forth a twangy country anthem as easily as a bone-rattling rock song. Thus far, his career as an artist is marked by three No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart (“Truck Bed,” “Beers on Me” with Dierks Bentley and Breland, and “One Beer” with Lauren Alaina and Devin Dawson) and a trio of No. 1s on the Hot Hard Rock Songs chart (“Psycho,” “Rock Star” and “Sold Out”). That’s in addition to the many songs he’s penned for other artists including Morgan Wallen, Carrie Underwood, and Blake Shelton.

After releasing Hixtape Vol. 1 in 2019, followed by his debut country album A Rock in 2020, HARDY spent the past few years diving headlong into his hard rock influences. In 2023, he unveiled the mockingbird & The Crow, a split-down-the-middle hybrid of country anthems and fury-fueled rock with lyrics that still held country signifiers. That record paved the way for 2024’s Quit!!, which leaned even harder into his rock and metal influences, with collaborations alongside Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit) and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith.

He embraces the freedom of genre-bending, saying, “At the end of the day, music should not come with a rule book. I think it’s cool that people are bouncing around [genres]. A lot of people roll their eyes like, ‘Oh, so-and-so’s doing a country album now.’ But music should have no rules, and I’m here for it.”

His new album not only declares his passion for the country music genre hasn’t dimmed (most notably on songs such as “Take the Country and Run” and “Keep It Country”), but gives glimpses into his earliest songwriting, while offering a clear-eyed purview of the shifts the country music sound has seen over the past few years.

The Mississippi native studied songwriting at Middle Tennessee State University. In 2018, he was one of the first songwriters to be part of Relative Music Group, formed by Dennis Matkosky and his son Jesse Matkosky. HARDY earned his first No. 1 Billboard Country Airplay hit as a writer with the Morgan Wallen/Florida Georgia Line collaboration “Up Down” and went on to sign with Big Loud Records.

The new album’s “Dog Years,” written from the perspective of a faithful canine companion in its twilight years, looking back on his life with his human friend, is a decade-old solo write from HARDY. “It’s one of the oldest songs in my catalog,” he says. “That was on my Schedule A, a list of songs you bring into your publishing deal. I can’t believe nobody ever cut it, and I just never had a place for it beforehand,” he says, adding that the song resurfaced after Miranda Lambert heard it and asked him to perform it at a MuttNation charity event.

The new album’s “Bro Country” finds HARDY and his vocal collaborator/ co-writer ERNEST revisiting the legacy of the musical style that dominated country radio in the 2010s, while also acknowledging how musical tastes have shifted since then. As a writer, HARDY contributed to multiple songs of the era, such as “Up Down.”

“We always knew we were going to sing it together, whoever ended up cutting it first, and I beat him to it,” HARDY says. “Some feathers may have gotten ruffled in town, with people thinking I was calling a whole genre irrelevant, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s really more about how times change, and that’s okay.”

Mortality threads through much of his Country! Country! project, whether in the haunting “Goodbye” or “We’re All Going to Die.” “Bottomland” finds him pondering what the funeral service will be like after his passing. The video for the song features HARDY singing while lying in a casket in the ground— imagery that isn’t entirely foreign to him. Before chasing his dreams in Nashville, HARDY once worked for a local cemetery department in Mississippi.

“I did that for about six months or something,” he recalls. Of filming the graveyard scene, he adds, “It really wasn’t that bad, to be honest. I had to do a music video once in a straight jacket [his video for ‘Psycho’], and I felt like that was more claustrophobic than the grave was. Sadly, it was kind of cozy down there.”

Living life to its fullest is a concept that weaves throughout the project. “Even a song like ‘Luckiest Man Alive,’ it’s recognizing your mortality,” he says. “But it challenges you to want to be a better person, and live a better life. I feel like it’s just a hodgepodge of all of that.”

He says some of that thematic thread likely stems from a 2022 accident, when HARDY and other members of his team were significantly injured when a tour bus they were traveling in overturned on I-40 while returning to Nashville. Nearly a year later, he canceled several shows, citing panic attacks and anxiety.

“I think probably subconsciously, although it’s been a couple of years now, the bus accident really shed a pretty bright light on my mortality and how fragile life is in general,” he reflects. “Since then, I’ve maybe been in this headspace of, ‘Hey, don’t think it can’t happen to you, because it definitely can.’”

He says therapy has been a key to healing: “I kind of had my mental breakdown a year after that, and then I went to a lot of therapy and took all the right steps to deal with trauma. I’m way on the other side of it now.”

The album also holds moments of his signature wit and humor. “Y’all Need Jesus” pokes fun at online haters, born out of his first experiences with online trolling after the release of Quit!! “You can read a thousand good comments, but one comment like, ‘Lose some weight, buddy,’ and I’m just climbing the wall,” he says. When Jessie Jo Dillon, Drew Parker and Zach Abend suggested a tongue-in-cheek song aimed at his online trolls, HARDY agreed. “The song’s not meant to be taken seriously. It’s just trying to poke fun at myself, the haters and the whole situation.”

As most artists have to deal with vitriolic comments from online haters to some degree, HARDY seems to have found his best way of dealing with it. “Usually I will type up some sort of response and then let my manager or my wife talk me out of it,” he says. “I think I’ve clapped back on somebody twice and it never works. The people that are doing this stuff are truly trying to get a rise out of you and any kind of clap back. There’s nothing you can do or say that’s going to benefit you at the end of the day for clapping back to a fan, so my short answer is I keep my mouth shut.”

Besides, he has plenty of momentum, both professionally and personally, to focus on. He recently played a headlining concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden, a show that concluded his Jim Bob World Tour. He also launched the rock imprint Crow Records in partnership with Big Loud Rock earlier this year. Outside the spotlight, he’s also seen his life take on new dimensions; he and his wife Caleigh welcomed their daughter Rosie Ryan in March.

“She’s perfect,” he says of his daughter. “I’m just full-on dad mode. The emotion I feel when she looks at me and she knows who I am — it’s unbelievable.”

Where HARDY goes creatively from here is still up in the air, even to him. “I don’t know if my next record will be fully rock or what,” he says. “But the rock stuff is here to stay, too.” But his new album Country! Country! is a potent reminder that his creative explorations haven’t removed him from his country music roots.

“I hope this leaves a lot of fans relieved, because so many people were just so worried that I was leaving country music forever,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere. This record is proof of that.”