10 Perfect Country Music Albums With No Bad Songs
6. Chief - Eric Church
For as long as they've been around, rock and country have never been all that far apart. Though the more noisier genre prefers to have a lot more diversity in their material, the idea of a musician living outside the law and doing whatever the hell they want definitely rings true in both camps. So when the bro country boom was about to hit its stride, Eric Church decided to give country a little more edge with Chief.
That's not to say that this is the heaviest thing ever made, with songs like Springsteen being one of the more celebrated slowburns in modern country music. No, where this album really shines is just how much it's willing to drop the country music label altogether on some songs, with Drink In My Hand practically being a booze anthem that the Rolling Stones never got around to recording.
This is still a country album though, and the more hardened parts of the genre get their fair share of time as well, like when he breaks out the banjos for the dark gypsy sounds of Creepin or piling on the melodrama about a bad seed on the song Homeboy. Though a lot of modern country acts have co-opted this sound (and not always for the right reasons), this is the kind of album that someone like Bruce Springsteen would have made if he were born in the South rather than New Jersey.