MITCHELL TENPENNY - Breaking My Heart - Riser House/Columbia Nashville

After a monumental year that included his first stadium shows and a tremendous success story with his latest single “Bigger Mistakes,” Mitchell Tenpenny arrived in 2024 with a nationwide performance on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon and his ninth #1 song at SiriusXM’s The Highway.  

He now strikes while the proverbial iron is still hot, delivering his first new music of the year with “Breaking My Heart.”

With an already proven track record of exploring breakups and their straining emotional aftermath, he glides into the 80s infused, modern country midtempo with the familiarity of his signature feels still intact as he begins to unravel the heartache struggles of trying to move on.

Cleverly juxtaposing the idea of whether she’s physically everywhere that he is or if hers is simply a memory that’s following him around, Tenpenny laments that she’s still driving him crazy even though it’s been 8 weeks since they split while boldly suggesting that if she doesn’t love him anymore, then to go ahead and hate him so that he could move on.

On the back of a melodic progression, the pain induced lift into the chorus perfectly matches the punch of the instrumentation as he pleads:

“Baby, don’t you kinda wanna stay in tonight

Or at least go walking into some other bar

Don’t you need a break from breaking my heart

Baby, won’t you let me get on with my life

Cause everywhere I go it’s like there you are

Don’t you need a break from breaking my heart”

Piggybacking off of what he set in place when he told her to hate him if she doesn’t love him anymore, he reassures her that it’s okay to lie about how quickly she’s gotten over him, echoing similar sentiment in the bridge as the franticness of the guitar shreds surround his angrier tone as he spills his frustration with a stamping down of his foot, “I think you hurt me enough, aren’t you getting tired of messing me up?”

Mitchell Tenpenny has been working tirelessly to achieve these current mainstream moments since first arriving on the scene in 2018 with “Drunk Me.” However, as this immense amount of success has arrived for the country superstar, he’s continually shown that he’s just getting started.

Where many of the rising talents on the scene would be resting in these heralded accomplishments and allowing space to marinate within them, Tenpenny instead opts to get even stronger with each release, carefully exploring the depths of his signature sound while taking some risks within it to result in huge steps forward each time out.

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis)

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