Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	82/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
American Songwriter
Country Weekly	A
Entertainment Weekly	A
The Guardian
Newsday	B+
The Oakland Press
Rolling Stone
Spin	9/10
USA Today

The Outsiders is the fourth studio album by American country music artist Eric Church. It was released on February 11, 2014, via EMI Nashville. Like all of his previous albums, it is produced by Jay Joyce. It was before the release that Church received media attention for saying "I think genres are dead." This comment irked certain news outlets.

Two singles were released prior to the album's release: the title track and "Give Me Back My Hometown". Both were met with positive reviews from critics, and charted in the top 10 Hot Country Songs chart. The latter also reached number one on the Billboard Country Airplay chart, becoming his fourth chart-topping single. The album's third single, "Cold One", was released in June 2014 and was a top 20 hit. The fourth single, "Talladega", was released to country radio on September 15, 2014, and became Church's fourth No. 1 hit. The fifth single, "Like a Wrecking Ball", was released to country radio on March 9, 2015.

The album received critical acclaim, and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and Top Country Albums Chart, with sales of 288,000 in its first week of release. It was the best-selling country album of 2014 in the United States.

In regard to the album's sound and genre, Church emphasized that he does not define his music by genre, calling it an "outdated concept." He goes further to say "I think the interesting thing is that there still are a bunch of stigmas about what this is or what that is. But I think the stigmas go away in the next 10 years, if they're not already going away now. I don't know what that means, I really don't." According to CMT, Church goes further to say "I think genres are dead. There's good music. There's bad music. And I think the cool thing about Nashville is it is at the epicenter of that kind of thinking. I'm a country music artist in Nashville, but Nashville is way, way, way bigger than country music."

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Wikipedia