Country music has always had a formulaic blend to it, but some artists know how to utilize it a lot better than others. Hannah Ellis is someone who understands the importance of connecting with her audience and, more importantly, adopting a stylistic profile that fits her voice organically, and this is precisely why her new album That Girl feels as naturally strong as it does. Where others are fighting the idea of embracing the minimalist elements that are comprising a new era of country jams, this is a singer/songwriter prepared to take her place in the center of the spotlight. To me, she’s found a way to take an old-fashioned formula and make it sound incredibly fresh and original, which is no easy feat by anyone’s standards.

There’s nothing one-note about the vocal Ellis is putting up in “Still,” “Wine Country,” “Plans,” or the brilliantly soft “Home and a Hometown,” and I like that she isn’t afraid to be a little indulgent at the microphone in any portion of That Girl. She hits these hooks with everything she’s got at a time when minimalism has been a disturbingly popular trend, and instead of giving us a taste of what we would hear in a concert setting, I get the impression she’s producing as close to a raw, live juggernaut as is possible from within the confines of a recording studio. 

“Karma on the Rocks,” “Someone Else’s Heartbreak,” and one of my favorite tracks from the record, “Country Can,” present us with an Ellis ready and willing to exploit rhythm as a means of accentuating her lyrics rather than as an agent of progressive exclusively, which on its own puts her leaps and bounds ahead of her rivals right now. She seems genuinely eager to experiment with the limitations of her genre, and yet there’s nothing here to indicate that she wants to abandon the core values of a more traditional country sound just for the sake of getting additional followers on TikTok. Contrarily, songs like “Somebody Else” and the namesake song in That Girl project an affection for the old school that can still exist in the new Nashville provided they’re being presented by someone as alluring as this artist and her work has been to date. 

Country’s pop side is getting a surge of buzz like few other genres in America are at the moment, but I can’t say that I’ve heard another singer doing it justice quite as well as Hannah Ellis is. I can’t wait to hear what she’s going to come up with next, but at any rate, I think it’s undeniable when listening to That Girl that Ellis is onto a firm formula for songcraft she could easily ride into the primetime if promoted in the right fashion. That Girl lives up to its lofty title and what it implies about its creator, and although star tracks like “Too Much & Not Enough” and “Country Can” stand out as obvious video/single hits, there’s no unwanted excess here. To me, this was made to captivate a new generation of country music lovers everywhere.

Clay Burton