country

Bailey Zimmerman

2 festivals played ↓

Illinois-raised country singer who broke through on TikTok before radio caught up — big, raw-throated heartbreak songs built for stadium singalongs.

Bailey Zimmerman grew up in Louisville, Illinois, picking up a guitar at nine while spending much of his childhood on dirt bikes and baseball fields. His mother played him hair metal, Kid Rock, Avenged Sevenfold and Nickelback, while his father filled long car rides with country radio. After finishing high school he worked briefly in meat-packing before taking a job on a gas pipeline in West Virginia.

He left pipelining to help run a truck-lift business with his stepbrother, promoting it on TikTok. A cover of Black Stone Cherry's "Stay," posted to impress a girl, led to a songwriting partnership with Gavin Lucas and the track "Never Comin' Home." Released in February 2021, it cracked Spotify's viral chart and led to a deal with Core Entertainment that August.

His voice does most of the work, strained and pushed to full volume over choruses built on heartbreak and regret. The production borrows more from rock and pop than from traditional country instrumentation, an approach as much shaped by the hard rock he grew up on as by his father's country tapes.

His debut album, Religiously. The Album., arrived in May 2023 and produced four number-one singles on Billboard's Country Airplay chart, including "Fall in Love" and "Rock and a Hard Place." A second album, Different Night Same Rodeo, followed in 2025, featuring "Backup Plan" with Luke Combs, which became his fifth number one on the Canada Country chart.

Read more

country