But he, too, is reverting to simplicity now. “What Makes You Country” is among his most temperate albums, alternately soothing and fatiguing. Perhaps because his voice is more genre-neutral than Mr. Shelton’s, Mr. Bryan — who sings with some soul music inflections — is emphatic about his rural signifiers. He uses “What Makes You Country,” the title track, to shore up his bona fides: “I got my dirt road cred when I was 12/On a no-cab tractor haulin’ them bales.” And there is “Hooked On It,” a whole song about fishing that is nowhere near as clever as Brad Paisley’s “I’m Gonna Miss Her (The Fishin’ Song).”

Image Mr. Bryan’s sixth album is “What Makes You Country.”

It is not insignificant, amid all this, that he makes room for tolerance: “I believe you love who you love/ain’t nothing you should ever be ashamed of,” he sings on “Most People Are Good,” in what qualifies as a bold embrace, for country music, of accepting sexual orientation diversity, recalling Kacey Musgraves’s conversation-starter “Follow Your Arrow.”. (Mr. Shelton has a writing credit on one of the 11 songs on “Texoma Shore,” Mr. Bryan wrote on seven of the 15 on “What Makes You Country,” though not “Most People Are Good.”)

Note that Mr. Bryan’s album title isn’t a question: As an early synthesizer of styles during an era when the genre was actively grappling with identity, Mr. Bryan has been making the case for big-tent country music for years. But “What Makes You Country” is a step backward, a fusillade of trite cliché. “I believe most people are good and most mamas oughta qualify for sainthood/I believe most Friday nights look better under neon or stadium lights,” he sings on “Most People Are Good,” which apart from its moment of inclusiveness is full of familiar small-town pride.

Mr. Bryan is better as a sensualist: “Light It Up” has the skittish pulse of a frayed relationship, and he’s at his most emotionally tactile on “Like You Say You Do,” about coveting a woman his friend is letting down. By comparison, his songs about slow living feel rote. Mr. Shelton, however, isn’t troubled by the same anxieties. Rather than belabor his qualifications, he just injects country attitude into his songs about other things. The sound around him, and the stars who make it, might change, but he never will.