In June, Michael Hardy, the 33-year-old musician who has already penned 15 country radio number ones, launched a highly anticipated 15-date arena tour focusing on his solo work. As a writer for musicians, including crossover success story Morgan Wallen and generational stars like Kenny Chesney and Blake Shelton, his work tends toward the mythic, laden with clever Southernisms and unique twists on traditional country subjects like hometown pride and thwarted love affairs. But in his own music, he draws more from his real life, spinning tales about a self-aware country boy turned Nashville man, something he delves deeper into on Quit!!, his new rock record out July 12.

“I didn’t move to Nashville with stars in my eyes. It wasn’t like, I’m going to be a big star. I just kind of wanted to write songs,” he told Vanity Fair over lunch at Keens Steakhouse last month in between tour dates.

Since he began performing as Hardy in 2018, country audiences have fallen hard for his live performances, and songs like “One Beer” and “Wait in the Truck” eventually became era-defining hits. The positive response to his turn as an artist came as a surprise. “When I started my career journey, I was so blind. I never thought to myself, Don’t have a plan B, I just didn’t have a plan B,” he said. “You just have to be so dumb that you’re going to believe that you’re going to make it, that eventually you will manifest it.”

Last year, he took a risk with a half-country half-rock concept album The Mockingbird & The Crow, adding in a few songs with power chords and metalhead-worthy screams. He got a welcoming response from hard rock radio, which sent a few of his songs to number one, and on Quit!!, Hardy is committing fully to the genre. His success as an arena rocker led a few of his heroes, like Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit to get in contact, and both wound up contributing to songs on Quit!!.

Getting a call from Durst was especially emotional for Hardy, who was a superfan during his childhood in small-town Philadelphia, Mississippi. “I was wearing a Limp Bizkit hat when he called me for the first time! It said ‘Live Laugh Limp Bizkit,’” Hardy said. Later, he asked Durst to write a verse on a new song pondering the nature of selling out artistically called “Soul4Sale,” and Durst obliged, quickly sending a finished product after hearing the track. “It was just so raw, and I don’t know—I giggled like a middle school kid when I heard it. I was just like, Holy shit.”

For the sake of his audience and his “very, very Christian” mother, Hardy was quick to caution that he isn’t really considering selling his soul to the devil for a 13-car garage. “Of course, I use this example all the time, but Johnny Cash didn’t really shoot a man in Reno. This is all just my art, first and foremost,” he said. “But when Fred committed, when he was like, Yeah, I’m in, I talked to him on the phone. The first thing I said was, I want [your verse] to be an angel on my shoulder. Let me be the one on the hook arguing with you, with you being a voice of reason.”

The decision to cast Durst as his moral conscience helps explain why Hardy wanted to make an album so indebted to Limp Bizkit’s brand of nu metal and rap rock in the first place. In his previous songwriting, Hardy has displayed a skill for sublimating those genres’ expressions of frustration and pain into lyrics that might initially come across as light-hearted country odes to women or to partying. On the new record, he consistently packs hard rock’s long-standing mix of masculine bravado, deep vulnerability, and committed derangement into a scant few lines—and it’s a romp. This might be most obvious in the chorus to album standout “Psycho”: “If you ever leave, girl, I’m gonna get a face tattoo / crash my truck, end up on the six o’clock news.”

As with Johnny Cash in Reno, Hardy isn’t actually the type to be a terrible ex. Still, there is a germ of truth in the song. In the stories behind Hardy’s lyrics, his wife, Caleigh Hardy, often acts as both muse and comedic straight woman, and the main line in “Psycho” came from a real difference of opinions. “Dude, it’s halfway a joke, but it’s really not,” Hardy said of the face tattoo line. “The only reason I’m not covered in tattoos is because, respectfully, Caleigh’s like, ‘Please don’t,’ and I’m, like, ‘Fair.’”

The couple, who married in 2022 about five years after Hardy first slid into her DMs, have a humorous rapport that plays out on their Instagram accounts, like a May video of Caleigh’s playfully stoic response to a “lullaby” Hardy sang in a guttural deathcore growl. She accompanied him on the tour bus for a chunk of this summer’s Quit!! tour, documenting his onstage fits—lots and lots of jerseys—and early moments with the couple’s new cat, which they named Dude.

Though the album takes on a huge variety of topics, there are a few songs that function as earnest love letters to Caleigh. On the song “WHYBMWL” (an acronym for “where have you been my whole life”), he talks about their first in-person meeting when he ordered a few shots of Sazerac Rye before getting up the confidence to talk to her, and an early moment in their relationship where they road-tripped from Mississippi, where she was attending the U of M, to her hometown in southern California. In 2022, Hardy was in a traumatic bus accident just a few weeks before their wedding, and in “Six Feet Under (Caleigh’s Song)” he mentions that the initial moments after his brush with death were consumed by thoughts of her.

Over lunch, Hardy explained that becoming a touring musician wasn’t originally in his plans, and when he started dating Caleigh in 2018, he was purely a songwriter. “I feel like we started dating and then my shit popped off. She got thrown into this celebrity wife situation, or whatever, and didn’t really have a choice. I sympathize with her.” Hardy’s success has brought changes both huge, like an onslaught of social media scrutiny, and small. “Caleigh is a country music fan, and it’s like, Oh, we can never go to a country music concert together and stand out in the crowd again.”

But Caleigh, who has a background in marketing, has adapted by growing her own enthusiastic social media following. She was also unflaggingly supportive when Hardy was diagnosed with anxiety last year and started going to therapy. “In October of last year, I guess you would say, I had a mental breakdown,” Hardy said. “I canceled half of my shows this year. So I was supposed to play 60-something shows and cut it to 30. I have not regretted it for one minute.”

The experience changed the way Hardy and Caleigh thought about their roles in the spotlight, and he said that they’ve figured out “balancing our relationship with this lifestyle” over the last six months. When Hardy returned to his alma mater, Middle Tennessee State University, to give a commencement speech in May, his experience with anxiety was central to the advice he gave the graduates.

“It’s really nice to just be open about that, because, dude, I’m not embarrassed about it at all. It’s wild that there was ever a time where you should be,” he said. “I truly feel like it is a chemical thing, something that doesn’t have anything to do with who you are as a person. It literally is an uncontrollable thing. I’m happy to be a voice for that because I’m not ashamed of it at all.”

Canceling the shows and dealing with his mental health allowed him to readjust after his rapid rise in the industry. “All of this just caught me by surprise. And then I look up a year later and it’s working, and I was just like, All right, well it’s working, let’s keep going,” he said, explaining that he felt trepidation about becoming a performer when he first signed a record deal but eventually decided it was okay to take the risk. “I had just read [Paulo Coelho’s] The Alchemist, a book about opportunities and openings. [I thought] Okay, I’m going to do this.”

Hardy is measured when he answers questions, especially when talking about the country’s recent return to the forefront of mainstream pop. An analytical and ruminant thinker, he’s starting to get comfortable making adjustments on the fly. Case in point: that face tattoo he so desperately wanted. As befits a burgeoning rock star, he has his share of tattoos, including a feather, flowers, and a snake on his right arm. But in that regard, he was a late bloomer. “I didn’t get any of these until I was like, 30,” he said. “I just kind of got the bug later in life.”

Hardy added that Caleigh’s main concern was how the tattoos might look when they have kids—but the ones he has now will be okay in “beach photos or whatever,” he said. Still, it’s a testament to the strength of their relationship that Caleigh and Hardy were able to come to some compromise—a more subtle inner-lip tattoo—during their trip to New York City. Soon after leaving Keens, Hardy met up with Caleigh at a shop in the East Village and had “JIM BOB” inked on his inner lip, a reference to his new song about a washed-up Southern dirtbag. He shared a photo of the new tattoo on Instagram, and of course, Caleigh responded in the comments: “So technically I’ll be kissing Jim Bob?”