If Zac Brown Band are aiming for a late-period Dave Matthews Band pivot — towards bigger stages, bigger feelings, a bigger sense of ‘togetherness’ — then ‘Love & Fear’ is the part where they try to turn a decade of arena muscle-memory into something spiritual and widescreen. The problem is that, for all the talk of duality, the album often confuses scale for substance, piling on glossy showpiece moments until the emotional centre buckles under the production’s weight.
The most telling swing is Animal, a bombastic, tribal-stomp hybrid that plays like country-rock trying on an Imagine Dragons sized hoodie. It feels performative rather than primal: all posturing percussion switches and sermon-ready chants, with little nuance in the songwriting to justify the theatrics.
When the band slows its heart-rate, they’re closer to landing it. The Sum opens with a restrained piano line and a genuinely persuasive melodic arc, but it eventually defaults to the album’s core habit: inflate, uplift, repeat.
You can feel the moment it’s engineered to “hit” at Las Vegas’s Sphere (where the band are mid-residency), and that’s precisely why it doesn’t.
The collaborations are the headline, yet they underline the album’s identity crisis. Let It Run with Snoop Dogg is breezy on paper, but the cameo lands awkwardly — a winking brand crossover rather than an organic left turn.
Meanwhile, Butterfly should be an undeniable triumph (Dolly Parton rarely misses), but the track’s “you’ve got this” sentiment is so airbrushed it ends up feeling more like a motivational LinkedIn post than a cathartic coming together of minds.
There are flashes of the band’s old warmth and craft, but too often ‘Love & Fear’ mistakes earnestness for insight, and maximalism for meaning. Dave Matthews Band can make a jam feel like a conversation, but here Zac Brown Band mostly just shout their affirmations, like word art in an awful house.
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