EXCLUSIVE: Ashley Cooke’s ‘The Hell You Are’ Brings Fire + Tempo to Her Next Chapter

Ashley Cookewaited a while to begin recording music for her next album after her 2023 major-label debut,Shot in the Dark.

That project included “Your Place,” a vocal-forward heartbreak ballad that earned Cooke her first-ever No. 1 hit at country radio last summer.

She admits that right after “Your Place” hit the top, she felt the impulse to strike while the iron was hot and keep releasing music right away.

Now, though, she’s glad she didn’t.

“I think if I had jumped the gun and just cut the stuff that I had written around the time of ‘Your Place,’ I would have been chasing something,” Cooke reasons in anew interview with Taste of Country.

In 2025, though, a new project from Cooke is well underway.

Her social media has been filled with new music teases, and on Friday, she dropped her latest song “The Hell You Are,” a track that’s the most confident, fiery take on a breakup song that fans of haven’t heard yet.

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Much of the singer’s upcoming material was written at lake house retreats in Nashville or Alabama, including this song: Cooke wrote it with Seth Ennis, Joe Fox, Chase McGill and Emily Weisband.

She says the title (and its double meaning) was McGill’s idea, and she fleshed it out to apply to her experience with “situationships” and run-ins with romantic partners who say they’re going to do one thing, but never deliver.

“I was in a place where I was like, ‘Man, I just want to own my worth and call somebody out for what they’re saying,'” Cooke continues.

She also wanted the song to be uptempo without sacrificing lyrical depth.She says she’s proud of the way “The Hell You Are” changes meaning.

It starts as thorny retort (“You’re saying that you’re sober / Oh, the hell you are”) but resolves into something more vulnerable (“You don’t even know the hell you are“).

“I wanna have dynamics in my show, but I don’t want to sacrifice the clever, cool lyric,” she explains. “So it was always harder for me to find songs that were tempo and felt great but then the lyric matched that … this song truly excites me so much because it feels like a mixture of those two worlds.”

Cooke will cop to some initial anxiety about following upShot in the Dark —the infamous “sophomore slump” — but after taking the time she needed to develop music that shows her artistic growth, those fears are gone.

“I genuinely am so proud of it, and because of that, the sophomore slump doesn’t feel as slumpy or scary,” she relates. “I am like, ‘Man, this stuff is so good, I’m just happy I get to put it out.'”

“I’m happy I got to create it and took the time that I needed to do that,” she adds.

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While she’s putting the finishing touches on her next album chapter, Cooke has also been throwing herself into some diverse passions that stem back to interests she had in childhood.

She recently participated in a Hardee’s commercial, which she says was especially fun since she did some acting as a kid.

She’s also continuing her work as a brand ambassador for Soles4Souls, a Nashville-based nonprofit whose mission is to gift shoes to children who might not otherwise be able to afford them.

Cooke started working with Soles4Souls years ago, when she and her sister were in a musical duo together, and she still participates in benefits and gifting events where she gets to hand kids their new boxes of shoes herself.

“We get to go into a room with these kids and present them with these brand-new, super-cool, branded shoes that are fresh out of the box, shoes they probably wouldn’t be able to afford and have access to otherwise,” she describes.

“It’s so fun to get to be a part of that, see their faces light up and know that it gives them so much confidence going into school. And maybe changes their trajectory a little bit.”