The year 2024 was a game-changing one for Benson Boone, the Monroe, Washington, native and American Idol dropout whose breakthrough hit “Beautiful Things” was among the year’s most-streamed songs. The lead single of his debut album Fireworks & Rollerblades was a runaway success that brought the 22-year-old to the stage of the 2025 Grammys, where he seamlessly busted a backflip off of a grand piano before launching into the sledgehammer chorus. As for his second flip of the show-stealing performance—that one was unplanned. “My thought process is that there’s not a thought process. It’s more like when I’m up there, I just do whatever feels right,” Boone told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe shortly after the performance. “During the moment, I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve been standing here for a while and I’m just going to do a flip.’ And that’s how it went.” With his second album, American Heart, the newcomer known for his electric stage presence and Freddie Mercury-esque falsetto steps out of the shadow of his biggest hit. Its 10 tracks, all written by Boone and frequent collaborator Jack LaFrantz, live in the anthemic sweet spot between Springsteen-style heartland rock and the arena-ready pop-rock of The Killers (particularly on “Young American Heart,” whose “live fast, die young” narrative was inspired by a near-fatal car accident Boone got into in high school). He stays grounded with a pair of songs in honor of his parents: the tear-jerking “Momma Song” plus “Mr Electric Blue,” a prog-pop epic about hero-worshipping his dad (who, mind you, can do backflips well into his fifties). The energy is up compared to his first record: As Boone explained to Lowe, lead single “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else” began as a sullen piano ballad and became a pulsing synth-pop banger about a run-in with an ex at a diner. Can lightning strike twice as far as another life-changing, world-conquering hit? Boone’s more interested in settling into himself. “I have such an eager mindset, where I’m always now, now, now: What’s going to happen right now? How are people going to react right now? What can I get right now?” he told Lowe. “In this career, that’s really good at times, but also it can get a little unhealthy, because it takes time—to figure out who you even want to be, and where you want to go, and what your goals are, and what kind of music you like, and who you want to make it with and what you’re trying to give the world.” He’s still evolving, he admits: “The music you hear from me right now probably won’t be the music you hear from me in 10 years. But I think I’ve finally found a version of my music that I really, really, really love.”