Ashley Cooke describes her self-titled second album as “a coming-of-age record disguised as a relationship album.”
Arriving on Aug. 14, it will feature 15 tracks, including her current hit, “the hell you are”; “baby blues” and “excuses” from 2025’s ace EP; her March release “xs” and “high school sweetheart,” which drops Friday.
ashley cooke follows her 2023 debut, shot in the dark, which launched her #1 hit, “your place.”
“Sonically it’s different,” she says of the new album. “It has a lot of different flavors in it, which is fun because I didn’t want a record that sounded the same from top to bottom. So there’s definitely some different elements and different flavors and cool things about it that I got to experiment with.”
“There’s a new producer on this record,” she continues. “Dan Huff produced it, and he’s a legend, an icon. He did a lot of like Keith Urban and Rascal Flatts. He played guitar on [Michael Jackson’s] Thriller. Like he is iconic and one of my great friends now, and he just, he crushed this record. So it was fun to get to work with a different producer. So it just kind of inherently, innately sounds different because of that.”
Ashley’s also amped the album up emotionally.
“I just feel like it hits a little harder, you know? Like it just feels a little different and just a little more mature,” she says. “And I think I just got really honest lyrically, which I didn’t not do on shot in the dark, but it just feels I really leaned into like the brutal honesty of every situation on this album.”
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