Growin' Up by Luke Combs
Growin' Up is the third studio album by American country music artist Luke Combs. It was released on June 24, 2022 via Columbia Records Nashville and River House Records. The album includes the singles "Doin' This", "The Kind of Love We Make", and "Tomorrow Me". Content Luke Combs confirmed the album's track listing on May 17, 2022. The album consists of twelve tracks, including lead single "Doin' This" which went to number one on Billboard Country Airplay earlier in 2022. The album also features a duet with Miranda Lambert on "Outrunnin' Your Memory". Combs wrote the album's songs over a two-year period, and worked with Chip Matthews and Jonathan Singleton as producers.
Luke Combs could’ve relied on a formula popular with so many of his country peers during the 2010s: swaggeringly flirtatious, beat-driven jams. Instead, he circled back to the evergreen country approach of placing a persuasive persona at the heart of his music, and quickly fired up a fanbase with his way of inhabiting the good-humoured blue-collar regular guy role. It helped that his songwriting was sturdy and clever and his performances hearty. On the follow-up to Combs’ blockbuster 2017 debut, that vantage point is even more robust, and also more knowing. “Beer Never Broke My Heart”, a propulsive honky-tonk number that initially appeared on an EP, is a mischievous take on avoiding emotional investment in anything with the potential to disappoint, and “1, 2 Many” is a vigorous barroom boogie featuring Brooks & Dunn—experts at that style—and full of playfully cocky bragging about boozy bad behaviour. “I think country music fans like songs that they can drink and have a good time to,” Combs tells Apple Music. “The fast-pumping rhythms and big Telecaster guitars take you back to what country music was like in the ’90s. Country fans are starved for an uptempo song, and that’s what this is.”<br /> Combs is equally charismatic delivering more sensitive songs, like the romantic ballad “Nothing Like You” and “Does to Me”, a collaboration with Eric Church that takes pride in down-to-earth sincerity. In "New Every Day" and "Every Little Bit Helps", Combs brings satisfyingly agile exertion to hooks that would humble a lesser singer. He continued his partnership with producer Scott Moffatt and core co-writer Ray Fulcher on this 17-song set, re-energising both muscular and supple sounds learned from a couple of generations of hard country predecessors.
