Album Review: Kelsea Ballerini Upends Country Music’s Patriarchy on ‘Unapologetically’

One upside to working in a genre in stagnation is that opportunities to creatively react to it — to underscore its weaknesses, to poke at its norms — abound. For the past several years, country music has been providing such an open playing field, thanks to its fatiguing overreliance on male performers. For a while, these singers specialized in a nearly toxic masculinity that treated women as objects, not subjects. Lately, they’ve shifted tactics, preferring a gentlemanly approach that still ultimately reduces women to two dimensions, receiving adoration rather than flirtation.

All the while, there has been Kelsea Ballerini, unflashily etching herself into the Nashville firmament.

This has been an optimal time for the arrival of Ms. Ballerini, a young singer-songwriter who is alive both to the ways young men casually presume the world is theirs, and the ways young women can, and do, subvert or outright ignore them.

“The First Time,” her 2015 debut album, was an astute, pop-friendly, emotionally savvy breakthrough, marking her as the most promising young female country star since Taylor Swift still called the genre home. Ms. Ballerini wrote about relationships with a witheringly clear eye, and about her family with even more sharpness. That these feelings arrived coated in a convincing pop sheen only made them more potent.

Ms. Ballerini, 24, further hones that approach on her strong second album, “Unapologetically,” which will be released Friday. It is arranged thematically, beginning with the darkness of a breakup and ending with the ecstasy of new love. The record’s conclusion mirrors changes in the life of Ms. Ballerini, who has recently gotten engaged, — but it does not diminish its power to note that she is at her most effective, and most savage, when writing and singing about scorn, dismissal and disappointment.

Ms. Ballerini’s most forceful subjects are independent-minded young women who emerge from circumstances that aren’t friendly to their ambitions. Take “High School,” about how men get stuck in an old idea about themselves — “Why would he wanna change when/Every memory still bows to him” — while women see that the emperor has no clothes.

“He’s still calling that first love, first time pretty-eyed blonde,” Ms. Ballerini sings. “And she’s still letting it ring, ’cause his ring isn’t what she wants/‘Cause she traded in prom queen for a big city dream and a slate that’s clean.”

There are oodles of recent country songs by male singers about how rural cowboy charm can seduce even the most stylish and committed woman of the city, but there are precious few from the perspective of the woman who, for good reason, left the small town — and its heroes — behind.

This is where Ms. Ballerini excels, though: with a male antagonist in mind and keen to dismiss him. “Miss Me More,” one of the fiercest songs on the album, is an extended farewell to a man who limited his partner’s options, and also to the system that normalizes that behavior. “I didn’t wear my high heel shoes/’Cause I couldn’t be taller than you,” Ms. Ballerini laments. “I didn’t want to lose my friends but now it’s hard to even find ’em/ It’s what you wanted, ain’t it.”

Her voice is winningly sweet, and also durably strong — it suggests a carefully withheld tenderness. And she is an elegant songwriter; many of the best songs here are written by Ms. Ballerini with Shane McAnally and Hillary Lindsey, masters of emotional detail. Occasionally, Ms. Ballerini gives in to grand feeling, and the less specific she is, the less affecting her songs are, like on “End of the World,” which mistakes grand sweep for depth.

But if Ms. Ballerini has a crutch, it’s the specter of Ms. Swift, who has demonstrated more than anyone how to dismantle Nashville’s patriarchy in recent years, and whose playbook she is sometimes peeking at. Throughout this album, there are melodies, chord changes, lyrical images and structural tricks that feel indebted to Ms. Swift’s first three albums. Even the way Ms. Ballerini lingers over certain vowels suggests the shadow of Ms. Swift. In order to fully come into her own, though, Ms. Ballerini needs to shake free of that as effectively as she brushes off country music’s simpleton men.