Nashville Hangover

Florida Georgia Line, country’s poets laureate of keg stands, try to grow up.

- Jonathan Bernstein

THE PAST half-decade of country music has often felt like one extended response to Florida Georgia Line’s 2012 hit, “Cruise,” which ushered in the wave of escapist fantasies set to syncopated drum loops that became known as “bro country.” Lately, though, the party’s more or less ended, as country has course-corrected toward more traditional, sensitive balladry. Even the poets laureate of beach bonfires and keg stands have moved on: In 2016, Florida Georgia Line’s Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley reinvented themselves with the pseudo-Christian pop ballad “H.O.L.Y.,” which they followed in 2018 with their anodyne Bebe Rexha collaboration, “Meant to Be.”