Onstage in Chicago, Zach Bryan Howled, and the Crowd Found Its Voice

The first two songs Zach Bryan played at the United Center on Tuesday night were from the more muscular end of his catalog. They landed hard and quick — Bryan was singing with a rugged howl, guitars were churning, the fiddle poked through the top like a squeal. This was opening night of The Quittin Time Tour, and the first of three sold-out shows here, and he was wasting no time pumping the audience into a frenzy.

Then he needed them to breathe — maybe he needed to breathe — and so next came “God Speed,” one of the most delicate and precise entries in Bryan’s catalog. It’s a song about surrender and, most importantly, hope, that rests entirely on his strummed acoustic guitar and determined, dusty voice. Bryan pulled his vocals back to let the words sink in, but somehow the crowd got louder and more committed, turning the song into a hymn. In a room of over 20,000 people, everyone was singing, yet somehow it was eerily quiet — the loudest hush imaginable.

Bryan, 27, is a singer whose hollers feel like hugs and whose laments land with a roar. For the past few years, his country-rock-adjacent rumbles have been inspiring a level of fevered devotion that has made him one of music’s most popular and least expected new stars. “Zach Bryan,” his second major-label album, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart last year, and its lead single, “I Remember Everything,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves, reached the top of the Hot 100. Half a year later, the song remains in the Top 10.

A Bryan live show is rooted in his sandpapered voice, his modest affect and his band’s surprisingly jubilant musical arrangements. But just as crucial is the crowd shout-along. It is something slightly different than a regular singalong; the harmony it suggests veers past musical to the emotional.

A couple of years ago, Bryan’s audience was packed with young men who sang his scraped-up songs unselfconsciously back to him. It all had the eau de Springsteen — deploying the magic of seeing a tough, resilient man confess to something much more wounded and ambiguous. But while that’s still part of the appeal, his crowd has expanded. There are more women now, and loads of teenagers, too, an indication of Bryan’s reach even if he has yet to become a traditional radio presence, and even if his allegiance to country music — which he toys with, and which the crowd’s outfits suggested an affinity for — is fickle.