For Zach Top, the golden era of country music doesn’t necessarily mean Waylon, Willie, and the boys. Though those architects of the outlaw movement certainly rank as inspirations for the Washington-born singer, Top actually taps country’s ’90s update for his endearing Cold Beer & Country Music, one of 2024’s breakout debuts. A former bluegrass kid, Top now lives happily—if, at least in love, unluckily—in the land that George Strait and Garth Brooks helped till for singers like John Michael Montgomery, Tracy Lawrence, and Tracy Byrd. Country music has long moved in cycles of nostalgia, looking to its past to reconsider the sound of its present. No one has yet to use the genre’s ’90s heyday as a springboard for current hits as well as Top—not yet born in 1994, the year he calls out as his country landmark. Top makes a sport of not hiding his touchstones. Opener “Sounds Like the Radio” begins like an homage to Brooks & Dunn’s “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” and then, much like that classic, celebrates the staying power and relatability of country itself. If he was born singing Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee,” just prop him up beside the jukebox if he dies, just like Joe Diffie. Everything here is wonderfully familiar terrain, all caked in peanut shells and washed in domestic suds: the one-night-stand aspirations of “Use Me” and “Lonely for Long,” the back-to-the-homestead paean of “Dirt Turns to Gold,” the vengeful turnabouts of the divorce-gone-bad sing-along “Ain’t That a Heartbreak.” Top co-wrote every song on Cold Beer & Country Music with a cavalcade of Music City ringers; still, they all have the uncanny feeling of long-term familiarity, like a rip in the two-step continuum of time and space. Top, however, adds just enough Gen Z winks to remind you that Strait and Brooks had both released box sets and greatest-hits compilations before he was even alive. It’s hard to imagine either of those predecessors, for instance, writing off a romantic romp for a “little bit of self-work,” as he smartly does on the title track. And he calls out karma and philosophy directly on “Ain’t That a Heartbreak,” like a divorcee who has read enough self-help books to know how to respect himself. Top affirms that young apostles of old country can, indeed, help their genre learn new tricks, no matter how stone-cold classic it all sounds.