Album Review – Gavin Adcock’s “Own Worst Enemy”

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Country pop (#530.2) on the Country DDS.

He’s country music’s wrestling heel. He’s an incessant internet troll, a living meme, and an embarrassment to himself and everyone around him. If he was a hockey player, he’d be a goon. But as we found out recently, he isn’t even willing to fight anyone. He’s a failed football player who was kicked off his college team for chugging a beer on camera before a game. He’s Gavin Adcock, and on a seemingly weekly basis, country fans have to ask what sin they committed to have this reprobate in their information feed.

Gavin Adcock immediate garners a strong visceral reaction from many in country music, bad or good. Like many of the other failed athletes that eventually made their way into country (Sam Hunt, Jason Aldean, et al), Adcock’s not here to make any sort of bold artistic statement. Music was just the next option on the list to get rich and famous, and not have to work a real job. Even to his most devout fans, the music is decidedly secondary to the “lifestyle” Adcock emits—the excuse to get people to pay attention. The stage antics and online persona is what he’s really selling.

This is all a good thing for Gavin Adcock, because his voice is incredibly thin and indistinct. Whatever his country music “style” might be, it’s mostly forgettable and nondescript. And yet somehow, Gavin Adcock’s music might be one of the least offensive things about him. Sure, this might say more about his personality than it does his songs. But his new album Own Worst Enemy isn’t the worst thing you can hear coming off of Music Row.

Don’t take this gracious musical assessment as a ringing endorsement by any means. But nonetheless, there is some latency between Gavin Adcock’s wild personality, what you expect from his music, and what it actually is. This is not Bro-Country, even though if Adcock had come of age 8 years ago, you can be rest assured he’d be braying about backroads, tailgates, and ice cold beer. There are no trap beats, synth pulses, or rapping in his songs either. Generally speaking, the music is organic, even if not really country in instrumentation.

But of all the offensive things a detractor of Gavin Adcock could enumerate, the entirely inaccurate assessment that he’s some kind of “Outlaw” would perhaps be the worst. Early on it was pretty obvious to Warner Music Nashville that Gavin would never garner attention as a star for the masses, competing for top CMA Awards, or even notable radio play, or that he would ever be able to keep his alcohol consumption in check. So they paraded him out as some sort modern version of Waylon Jennings, even though Waylon would publicly distance from many of the idiotic histrionics that are Gavin Adcock’s calling cards.

Gavin Adcock is simply a vessel to attempt to recapture some of the music revenue lost to the independent/underground swell in country music. The more certain segments of the country public clutch their pearls at the mere mention of his name, the more Adcock and his advertising cronies lean into the bad boy persona. But this is not the 1970s any more. We now know much more about mental health, addiction, and things like the “27 club.” We all know where this 26 year old is headed. But hey, he’s making a lot of folks a lot of money along the way. So at the moment, there’s no incentive to get in the way of it. They’re leaning into it.


Own Worst Enemy is a mild effort, but is just inoffensive enough to blend into the background of a morning commute or a weekend cookout for passive music listeners. It’s part Morgan Wallen, part Koe Wetzel, with just a little bit of the Zach Bryan influence baked into the lyricism at times to make it feel heady and meaningful to an audience that doesn’t know of better alternatives. The recurring themes of making mistakes and not leaning from them color this work throughout, and marry it to the real life Gavin Adcock experience.

That is not to say that the album isn’t without its good moments, especially when it has 24 tracks to find them. The totally acoustic “Heard Headed Heart” shows a level of maturity early on that’s unexpected. “Need To” finds an infectious groove to compliment a clever lyrical hook. These are also two of the three songs on the record not co-written by Adcock, and are the responsibility of Tucker Beathard and others. But they’re decent songs nonetheless.

By calling on a wide cadre of professional songwriters who can help give voice to Adcock’s drunken next day regrets, Own Worst Enemy isn’t entirely terrible. Though the majority of the producer work is handled by Jay Rogers, Brent Cobb and Cobb collaborator Oran Thornton actually handle a track, and Will Bundy who is known for working with more traditional country performers in the mainstream also co-produces some songs.

But make no mistake about it, Own Worst Enemy is a mainstream, major label, Music Row work, with all the earmarks thereof, including rising choruses, sacharrine melodies and turns, and just enough PG-13 language to make it seems unique to the “edgy” Gavin Adcock persona, evoking that bad boy image that all his fans eat up. Other wayward souls love to look up to Adcock as a folk hero of sorts. And even at his best, Gavin Adcock’s voice feels exposed, while the songs come with a very non-live aspect to them, like Adcock’s performances are layered on top as opposed to captured within the instrumentation.

But when the assessments and accounts of Gavin Adcock’s career are registered in the annals of country music, it won’t be the music that garners the first or even secondary mention. It will be the drunken antics on stage, the beefs and call outs of other performers, the arrests, and the narcissistic shitposts disguised as tough guy altruism pandering for applause at other people’s expense.

Gavin Adcock is still a young man. And if he ever wants to rise above his status of a wrestling heel, it will have to be from a redemption story, and an authentic one as opposed to the kayfabe reality he presents in the present tense. And for all those who say, “But hey, this is country music. Drunken antics have been going on forever,” it’s not 1982, and Gavin Adcock is not George Jones. It’s 2025, and Gavin is no more than a country music gadfly until he grows up and proves himself as something different.

6/10

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