Post Malone emerged from a porta-potty on a recent Wednesday afternoon to meet his new Nashville public.

The face-tattooed pop chameleon had been cruising slowly across downtown, hidden on the back of an 18-wheeler that carried just a couple of speakers, some beers, two to-go toilets and a pair of superstars. As usual, Post — born Austin Post and known as one or the other, or the cuter variation, Posty — had brought a friend along as a local emissary.

So when the truck’s flatbed cover fell and the bathroom doors opened, revealing him and burly country hitmaker Luke Combs, everyone in sight lost their minds as planned.

“Posty, we love you!” fans shouted amid a sea of raised cellphones. Professional cameras rolled, too, the herds thickening down Broadway as the truck eased past Nudie’s Honky Tonk, Jason Aldean’s Kitchen and the Whiskey River Saloon.

Like Nashville Pied Pipers, the once-unlikely duo were using the stunt to film a music video for Post’s new single featuring Combs, “Guy for That.”

But Post’s choice of company and his surprise appearance in the heart of town, working the crowd in a Dolly Parton Fan Club trucker hat and boots, also confirmed that Post Malone — like much of pop music — was going country.

After years of shape- shifting and some focused flirting, Post recently put out his new album, “F-1 Trillion,” two days after his debut at the Grand Ole Opry, a conquering capstone to his seamless embrace by the current country establishment.

The LP, featuring “Pour Me a Drink” and “Hide My Gun,” includes Nashville subject matter, storytelling, session players and stars including Parton, Morgan Wallen, Tim McGraw, Blake Shelton, Brad Paisley, Chris Stapleton, Lainey Wilson and Jelly Roll. Amid tributes to the old-school classics and ’90s power country, there’s also outlaw storytelling with the next- generation bluegrass star Billy Strings.

And although Post’s pivot has been years in the making, it couldn’t have landed at a better time: He released “F-1 Trillion” just as country is cresting in the zeitgeist.

These days, acts like Wallen, Combs and Zach Bryan regularly out-stream rappers and pop singers, while No. 1 hits like “Texas Hold ’Em” by Beyoncé and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey have cemented twang as the musical accent of the moment.

Already, it’s working for Post: “I Had Some Help,” his puckish single with Wallen, has commanded the country charts on its way to becoming the most dominant single of the year so far.

Yet it would be a mistake to see Post’s latest evolution as merely an exercise in trend hopping instead of the most perfect example and execution of his career modus operandi: using his electric charisma and pliable, Auto-Tuned vibrato to make friends in high places; remaining nimble and mutable enough to blend right in; and pulling off some of the defining, boundary-blurring smashes of the streaming age.

“Genres suck,” Post, 29, said in Los Angeles the week after his latest Nashville visit. “It’s easier to catalog music that way. But at a certain point — and the cool thing is that it’s moving towards this — why can’t you mix all this together and make something that’s truly unique to you?”

It’s a kumbaya refrain he has been echoing since not long after his first hip-hop-inflected single, “White Iverson” from 2015, when he tweeted “i am not a rapper, im an artist. you can’t box me into a genre or anything i jus make what i want,” much to the chagrin of those already questioning why a white teenager was “saucin’,” “swaggin’ ” and “ballin’ ” his way to a major label deal.

In the decade since, Post has toned down some of his defensive petulance and outlasted fever-pitched cultural conversations about appropriation, adopting an all-purpose sweetheart’s humility.

“I’ve still got my chains,” he said. “That’s still me. Everything was always me.”

Along the way, Post became an avatar, if not the poster child, for the genre-bending future promised by file- sharing and Spotify playlists, always nodding to his background as the weirdo son of a former wedding DJ who introduced him to metal, funk and gangster rap. (He credits his mother and grandparents in Big Sandy, Tennessee, with his appreciation of outlaw country.)

That good-vibes omnivorousness has made Post one of pop’s premier, in- demand collaborators. This year alone, Post has appeared on Beyoncé’s “Levii’s Jeans” and Taylor Swift’s “Fortnight.”

Post cites his lack of ego and pretentiousness — along with, self-deprecatingly, his mastery of Auto-Tune — as his selling point in the studio. He is also just good company.

“I just want to hang out, have a beer, listen to your ideas,” he said. “I feel like there’s a lot of people set in their ways. I just want to make the song work in the best way for the song.”

It makes sense, then, that “F-1 Trillion” is essentially a duets record, with stacked liner notes that include Nashville’s most musically progressive, decorated writers — Ashley Gorley, Ernest, Hardy — and classic session players, including brothers Paul and Larry Franklin, who added pedal steel and fiddle.

Post’s official introduction to the Nashville studio machine came last year via the producer known as Charlie Handsome.

Following Post’s tentative moves deeper into pop and rock on “Twelve Carat Toothache” in 2022 and last year’s “Austin” — his first albums that have not yet been certified platinum — he considered the idea that he had lost his sheen as a hitmaker.

“There was a second there where I was like, ‘Oh well, maybe I have made enough money, and it’s time to go and just ranch,’ ” he said.

But reconnecting over the pandemic with Handsome was like a portal to new possibilities.

Crucially, like Post, Handsome and Ernest, who became the album’s core engine, are also millennials raised in the South on as much rap as country. Like white rappers Kid Rock and Jelly Roll before him, Post saw an opening — and a welcome reception — in moving the other direction.

He theorized that the pace and over-digitalization of modern life made people crave “simpler lifestyles” and “more guitar.”

“I think they miss, you know, some authenticity,” Post said.