Tag: Country

Recognition as the Saving Country Music Artist of the Year is unique. It’s not tied to any specific album, song, live performance, or commercial success. It’s certainly not a popularity contest. It’s reserved for the one artist that most embodied and implemented the idea behind the phrase “saving country music” in a given year. It’s for someone who fearlessly shoulders the cause of true country and preserving the roots of the music, and despite the odds and adversity, finds success doing so.

The Saving Country Music Artist of the Year is someone who rekindles our spirit and hope that country music will be something future generations will also enjoy, and in it’s most genuine form. And when considering all of these requirements, is there a question in anyone’s mind that in 2024, the performer who most embodied this philosophy in country music was Zach Top?

Zach Top was the one who took the love for country music steeped in a style 35 years in the past, and not only paid it forward, but made it hyper popular in a capacity we never dreamed of being possible in the present tense. He took young people who’d never heard ’90s country, and old people who grew up on it, and put them all in the same audience. Then he made that audience as enthusiastic as any audience you will ever witness.

Proving that traditional country can still be commercially applicable, inspiring other performers to take up the mantle of true country music, and opening doors for his fellow neotraditionalist performers to succeed is the power that Zach Top’s success has afforded. Zach Top makes it possible to see a future in country that is more true to country’s roots than the present.

It’s not that we haven’t seen other performers over the last few years take up the charge of traditional country and find success with it. But they’ve never been so perfect to take it to the next level like Zach Top. Performers like Joshua Hedley and Jake Worthington helped set the table for the resurgence of the ’90s country sound, but it’s Zach Top who’s bringing the feast.

And it’s all resonating and catching on so deeply, the mainstream can’t ignore it. Zach Top is receiving mainstream country radio play. He’s getting nominated for CMA Awards. Above all, Zach Top simply has a cool factor that audiences connect with. And at 27 years of age, his career is just getting started.

The Saving Country Music Artist of the Year does not go through a nomination process, and there is no vote for the winner. But if there was a clear runner up in 2024, it would be Kaitlin Butts. Not only did she release a landmark, conceptualized album in Roadrunner! that’s nominated for Saving Country Music Album of the Year, she might have been the hardest-working performer in country music in 2024. Constantly on tour and playing festivals coast-to-coast, Kaitlin burst through this year, and became one of the top performers in independent country.

But 2024 will go down as the year of Zach Top. And when we look back at all that he accomplished in 2024, we might be giving it credit to these moments for helping to take the effort to save country music to new heights previously unseen. And there’s no concern that Zach Top will hop genres on us, or contemporize his sound. If he pulls a wild card, it will be to release a bluegrass album like he did with his debut.

Breathe a sigh of relief true country music fans. The future is in good hands. The future of country music is Zach Top.