These days, big-deal country star Sam Hunt, who was a bit of a mold-breaker before everyone in Nashville started singing in Drake cadences over 808s, appears to be operating on the Cardi B model. His albums are very infrequent. Sophomore LP Southside came out four years ago, and that was six years after his debut. But he’ll drop a one-off single every now and then. Last year, Hunt released the song “Walmart,” “Outskirts,” and “Women In My Life.” Today, he’s got another one.

The new Sam Hunt song “Locked Up” is not an Akon cover, though I guess you could say it’s written from a similar perspective. In 2019, Hunt was arrested and charged with a DUI, and he was eventually sentenced to a year in jail, with all time suspended except for 48 hours. Hunt co-wrote and co-produced “Locked Up” with a team of Nashville pros, and the song is definitely inspired by that brief sentence.

“Locked Up” is a warm, catchy midtempo lope, with Sam Hunt singing sweetly over those ever-present trap 808s. He described the dumb decisions that landed him that very short jail sentence and thanks his wife Hannah Lee Fowler for supporting and staying with him through all that. In the period-piece video, Hunt riffs on the iconography of Johnny Cash playing for inmates at Folsom Prison, with Fowler in the June Carter Cash role. Check it out below.

“Locked Up” is out now on MCA Nashville.