Midweek Notes – Lee Brice

In between Hymn Sheets, I wonder why a popular country singer pushed back the release of his new album by four months. Is it so he can put out 32 songs rather than 16, or something else?

What on earth is Lee Brice playing at?

I was sent his new album Sunriser to review for Country Music People (cmpcountry.com to subscribe!), but it transpired that its June 5 release date had been put back four months. Brice had decided, in his and his label Curb’s infinite wisdom, to add an entire new set of songs to it, to make it a double album. This is not unprecedented; Cody Johnson did it when he added a dozen more as part of a deluxe edition of his album Leather. Popstar SZA did that too, bundling in the 2025 album Lana with the 2022 one SOS. Taylor Swift famously waited less than a day before adding a second disc to her Tortured Poets Department project, which only bloated it and greased her streaming numbers.

Brice, though, is not Taylor Swift or SZA. He’s a Trump supporter who in February 2026 popped up on the Turning Point USA halftime show which was set up in protest of the world’s biggest rapper, Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny, headlining the NFL Superbowl show. Turning Point USA is an organisation which is in favour of free markets and conservative views on race, gender and religion. Its founder Charlie Kirk was effectively given a state funeral after he was shot dead last year. TPUSA is quite hostile to transgender people, and harboured doubts over the source of the Covid-19 pandemic and the legality of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. They also set up a Watchlist to snitch on academics and school governors whose views do not agree with their own.

Just because Brice played the event, that doesn’t mean he supports their views, but he doesn’t not support them. He has been a presence in country music for two decades and still commands big arenas for his tour; last weekend he showed up to play amphitheatres in Minnesota. His setlist is packed with number ones, not least the 2013 CMA Song of the Year I Drive Your Truck and the grown-up country songs Rumor, I Don’t Dance and Boy. Brice was also chosen as Carly Pearce’s duet partner for I Hope You’re Happy Now, because its writer Luke Combs already had enough songs on the radio.

Brice himself wrote Crazy Girl, a number one hit for Eli Young Band around the time Brice launched his solo career. A Woman Like You hit the top in 2012, as did the follow-up Hard to Love; he wrote neither of them, nor did he write I Drive Your Truck, but he did co-write the fluffy Parking Lot Party with Thomas Rhett (hence ‘Thomas pulling his guitar out’) and TR’s dad Rhett Akins. Akins and supersongwriter Ashley Gorley (who also co-wrote Rumor) helped Brice write the ballad That Don’t Sound Like You, which was the first song of Brice’s I heard when I started listening to contemporary country in 2015. I liked the voice more than I liked the song.

Brice last put out an album in 2020, when the world had other things on their mind, but Hey World still gave him the smash hits One of Them Girls and Memory I Don’t Mess With, both of which he co-wrote. The radio loves his resonant voice, and the UK loves Jon Stone, who co-wrote A Woman Like You and often comes to the UK as part of the duo American Young with his wife Kristi. Lee’s brother Lewis has also played in the UK, while Lee had himself been due to play Shepherd’s Bush Empire in July 2020 as part of a four-date tour which was never rescheduled.

And so to his new music. His recent song Cry rips off Stand By Me, the Ben E King classic written by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. The new album also includes several songs which he pre-released as teasers: the clever Killed The Man, where the hook is that Brice is not the man he used to be; Truck Bed Mixtape, which is a fine love song; What You Know About That, a dreadful shoutalong that might have been passed on by his Curb labelmate Dylan Scott; and album closer When The Kingdom Comes, which begins with images of hungry kids, suicidal teens and single mums, and concludes with how “there’ll be nothing left but love” at the end of days. Tell that to the guys at Turning Point USA, Lee.

Brice, who once had a hit called Drinking Class, brings in Nate Smith and Hailey Whitters as his Drinkin’ Buddies, and half a dozen pals who shared radio playlists with him in the early 2010s including Jamey Johnson, Jerrod Niemann and Randy Houser pop up on Said No Country Boy Ever, an idea which was first done a decade ago by both Jana Kramer and Old Dominion. These pileups look like record label machinations with little nutritional value.

Elsewhere on the album, whose songs people will likely not get to hear until October, there are filler ballads in She Wasn’t Like That, Bury The Dead, Old Men and Daddy Don’t Care. All of them exist in the shadow of the much better ballads with which Brice has made his name, written by much better songwriters. Me And Whiskey resets the ‘first comes love’ playground chant to the barroom, while Devil’s At It Again replaces Charlie Daniels’ Georgia-headed fiddler with a wacky synth player. The title track, which also opens the album, addresses and celebrates its intended audience of hard-working men and is basically a rewrite of Alabama’s 1985 hit 40 Hour Week (For a Livin’), which also ticks off various blue-collar professions. Oddly, Brice’s vocals sound canned and not properly mixed.

At the end of April, six weeks before the album was due and with half of it already released to streaming services, Brice excused the four-month postponement by saying he ‘kept writing’. There now seems to be two versions of the album, a single- and double-disc one, coming out in October. This smacks of some desperate label meetings and, perhaps as with Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets project, a way to grease the album’s sales. Double perhaps, it might help Brice reach the end of his deal with Curb Records. Just why has he taken six years to follow up 2020’s Hey World?

Could it be something to do with his political affiliation? Why did he play the Turning Point USA show in the first place, where he debuted Country Nowadays, a song on Sunriser where he sings of how he wants to ‘feed my dogs’ and not be cancelled for telling his kids ‘that little boys ain’t little girls’. Satirist Jon Stewart lambasted Brice for asking what was ‘so hard about being country nowadays’, given that drinking beer, mowing the lawn and catching fish ‘sounds pretty easy’ to do. And those comments about trans children really go against the ‘trans cartel’ within country music(!).

Jason Aldean, who has also allied himself with Trump, had no problems with releasing his album Songs About Us in April, although it entered the US album chart at a very disappointing number 24 and missed the top five on the country side entirely (more a voice than a writer, Aldean wrote a grand total of two of the album’s 20 songs). Nobody in 2026 will become a new fan of Aldean or Brice, and like many country acts before them, they are now preaching to the converted while also filling impressively sized venues.

Whatever has happened to delay the arrival of Sunriser, it doesn’t bode well for its October rollout. Take it from someone who has heard the rest of it, or the rest of the first half of it.