Spidey Smith
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 all the next two weeks. Last week, we revealed our Honorable Mentions artists for 2025 as well as our Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year artists. Now, we reach No. 8 on our list with an artist who maintained his absurdly high commercial standards with one of the year’s biggest (and longest) albums, and had some big pop culture moments to boot: Morgan Wallen.
Listen to our Greatest Pop Stars podcast discussion about Morgan Wallen’s latest winning season here.
In 2025, country superstar Morgan Wallen furthered his ascent into the top tier of music’s zeitgeist, continuing to cement his status as a musical powerhouse both within his genre and far beyond, hitting new career high marks both on the charts and on the road.
In January, Wallen signaled that the year would be another banner year, by revealing his fourth studio album, I’m the Problem, and releasing the hit title track. He’d already primed fans for a juggernaut album with Hot 100-topping “Love Somebody” in 2024, but the title track shaped the tone for some of the moodier moments on the album, detailing a hazardous, spiteful relationship and laying the groundwork for an expansive album brimming with songs that are steeped in heartbreak and relational tension.
At the Grammys in February, Wallen was still riding high from his hit collaboration with Post Malone, “I Had Some Help,” as the song was nominated for best country song as well as best country duo/group performance, and was still entrenched in the upper echelon of the Hot 100 nearly nine months after its debut. The following month, he appeared on SNL, where he performed the new songs “I’m the Problem” and “Just in Case,” but also garnered backlash after leaving the show slightly early, after exchanging brief pleasantries with show cast members. In the process, he created one of the year’s top memes when he posted an Instagram photo of himself seemingly flying back to Tennessee following filming, captioning the photo with, “Get me to God’s country.”
I’m the Problem arrived May 16, with Wallen celebrating the release of I’m the Problem by playing his only show outside of North America for 2025, performing at Camden’s Roundhouse in London. The 37-song album immediately dominated, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, with nearly 500,000 equivalent album units in the United States. Problem debuted at No. 1 in seven countries, building upon the success of previous albums If I Know Me, Dangerous: The Double Album and One Thing at a Time, which have each spent more than 100 weeks on the Billboard 200, with the latter two albums still residing in the chart’s top 20. In May, Wallen also broke his own record for the most simultaneous number of entries on the Hot 100, logging 37 songs on the chart.
The album again proved Wallen’s ability to create music with genre-spanning, timeless appeal, pulses of R&B, rock and hip-hop interlaced through his core country sound. The album touches on topics including heartbreak and various temptations, but he also veers into fresh territory lyrically, including with a tender ode to fatherhood (“Superman”) and with musings on the unstable state of the world (“I’m a Little Crazy”).
With I’m the Problem, Wallen continued cementing himself a formidable force and essential artist in the music landscape, dominating the all-genre Billboard 200 albums chart for much of the year (13 weeks total) and notching sales/streaming numbers that rival, and often outpace, many pop stars in the league. The project also advanced his influence on the greater pop music culture, as Wallen teamed with pop hitmaker Tate McRae on the song “What I Want,” a song that earned Wallen his fourth Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit. Problem also featured collaborations with his longtime collaborators Eric Church (“Number 3 and Number 7),” HARDY (“Come Back as a Redneck”), Post Malone (“I Ain’t Comin’ Back”) and Ernest (“The Dealer”).
The same weekend Wallen released I’m the Problem, he also launched his inaugural, three-day Sand in My Boots Music Festival in Gulf Shores, Alabama, welcoming fans for a weekend of sun, fun and music. The fest’s cross-genre lineup included Wallen headlining one day of the event, while also welcoming not only fellow country hitmakers including Post Malone, Brooks & Dunn, and Riley Green, but also rap and R&B luminaries such as Wiz Khalifa and T-Pain and indie rock favorites such as The War on Drugs and Real Estate.
In June, he returned to full-blown stadiums, with his headlining I’m The Problem Tour spanning 20 stadium shows in 10 cities. He continued fueling his star status by welcoming a rotating lineup of openers that included both rising hitmakers (Gavin Adcock, Ella Langley), established artists (Miranda Lambert, Thomas Rhett) and Country Music Hall of Famers (Brooks & Dunn). He heightened the buzz around each tour stop by, as he’d done on previous tours, featuring surprise celebrities during his stage walkouts. For his 2025 run, he treated fans to unexpected appearances from musical and/or sports figures including Drake, Brett Favre, George Kittle and Trent Williams.
After landing at No. 2 on Billboard’s charts-based all-genre top artists list in 2024, he ended 2025 ringing the bell as the recipient of the top artist of the year honor, becoming the first male country artist in over 30 years to accomplish that feat. In total, Wallen and his music also topped more than a dozen Billboard 2025 year-end charts, among them top male artist, top Hot 100 artist and top country artist.
He also used his success to give back to students participating in music and sports, two of his lifelong passions. The Morgan Wallen Foundation donated new musical instruments to students at a school in Wallen’s hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, and donated musical equipment and/or instruments to students in states including Alabama, Texas and Washington during his I’m the Problem Tour. The foundation also supported sending 35 students to art and music camps last year.
Once again, Wallen ends 2025 at the center of the enduringly triumphant confluence of country, pop and hip-hop sounds — while forging his reputation as a charming, energetic performer who is redefining what mainstream success looks like for a country artist on a global scale.
Listen to our Morgan Wallen Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 podcast discussion here, check back for our No. 7 artist tomorrow, and stay tuned the next two weeks as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of 2025 on Friday, Jan. 30!
