H.E.R. did get all those Grammy nominations, yeah…
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Alfred Soto: With “Choosin’ Texas” an official smash the likes of which I didn’t expect last September, Ella Langley chooses “her” as a target, with conventional results. Another list song: references to “lover, sister, wife,” she only smokes on vacation, sez just what she thinks, needs no validation.” The chorus has no muscle — the hook and melodies don’t complement the lyrics’ tell-don’t-show approach. This song is all kick drum and attitude.
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Katherine St. Asaph: After “Choosin’ Texas” became an enormous chart hit, Ella Langley clearly believes a full pop crossover is within reach, so she’s trading her rowdier (and better) Southern-rock material in for a lite, bedroom-pop-adjacent sound, and trading familiar country tropes for familiar pop tropes. Langley’s written frequently about her struggles with insecurity, but songs like “Could’ve Been Her” are basically classic country storytelling arcs, while “Be Her” is something more modern: the conceit of envying that girl. And I don’t think it’s going to work as a crossover, because as is frequent in country, the whole conceit relies on cultural context that is very different for mainstream pop and mainstream country audiences. Here, it’s the nature of the idealized woman. Langley: “She drinks wine by the glass, not by the bottle.” Tate McRae: “She’ll wear a tight mini black dress with all her friends around.” Langley: “She’s a lover, a mother, a sister and wife.” Laufey: “Her siren’s kiss will send you straight into abyss.” Langley: “She knows being rich is just a state of mind.” Olivia Rodrigo: “In your daddy’s nice car, yeah, you’re living the life.” Both archetypes are unattainably put-together, but where one girl is unattainably down-to-earth and free of vice (indeed, explicitly Christian), the other is unattainably privileged and sexually alluring. (Unlike “Lacy,” “Amelie,” or “Sympathy Is a Knife” — or “Jolene,” “Girl Crush,” etc. — “Be Her” has no romantic subtext whatsoever, but even by platonic-girl-crush standards it’s astonishingly chaste: there’s literally one word here about what this woman looks like, and it’s a reference to “heels.”) With songs like these, the music contributes less to their popularity than their relatability — how well they intervene in how many anguished hours, and how few lyrics you have to ignore in the process. And put bluntly, “Be Her” assumes an audience for whom “she stays talkin’ to Jesus” is a universally enviable trait, which limits its reach dramatically. (But check back in a year.)
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Al Varela: A new entry in the “do I want to be her or be with her canon. I have no doubt that Ella Langley is straight, but a gender envy song is still a gender envy song. Really big fan of the breezy country production that still has the structure and tightness of a catchy pop song. I can hear the Kacey Musgraves influence, and I’m thrilled! Ella herself is what sells the song though, with a great dejected performance ;you can feel the desperation and exhaustion that leads to this train of thought.
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Claire Davidson: My reluctance to embrace Ella Langley has always come down to her morose vocal timbre, so it’s nice to hear her on a track that actually allows her to brood with real potency. Lyrically, though, “Be Her” is pretty thin, even by the standards of country’s clean-cut folk wisdom. Langley’s narrator envies a woman who seems to have it all together, yearning for a life defined by contentment instead of the “drama” that seems to dominate her own. The song invites comparison to Langley’s fellow leading lady in country: “Be Her” is essentially the inverse of “Bells & Whistles,” a duet between Kacey Musgraves and Megan Moroney that appeared on the latter’s album Cloud 9 not two months before this song’s debut. But where “Bells & Whistles” delighted in its willingness to flout (male) expectations of unassuming pleasantries, “Be Her” sees its protagonist yearn for a brand of womanhood defined by inoffensiveness—quite the choice in 2026, where everything from the beauty industry to the American political landscape writ large is demanding that women shrink themselves for the public eye. Troubling lyrical subtext aside, though, what’s more trying about this song is the dead-end approach to its composition, grounded in a two-note guitar lick that’s more evocative of banging one’s head against the wall than any sort of introspection or depth. Unsurprisingly, Ella Langley doesn’t have the energy to convey the desperation of the hook, but given that refusing to call attention to herself seems to be the goal of this song, perhaps she accomplished exactly what she wanted.
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Jessica Doyle: If you put this up against Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” the latter feels more full, musically–Ella Langley’s chorus gets a little repetitive–though that’s not the reason I thought of the comparison. The plural of country song is not data, obviously, but it does feel like progress of a sort when even not-subversive women from Alabama are tormenting themselves not with the question of how to be a better wife, but how to be a better person.
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Nortey Dowuona: The Tyler Perry/The Undertaker mixture who made this song also helped write this lush, pining song about trying desperately to become someone admirable. I was going to say something trite, like “this is unexpected,” but this makes perfect sense for both Langley and aforementioned mixture. Miranda Lambert, look out!
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Julian Axelrod: I appreciate the specificity of Langley’s vision; even her idealized (other?) woman feels grounded in reality. The longer she sings the unembellished hook, the more shapes it assumes: “I just wanna be her” becomes “I just wanna be heard” becomes “I just wanna be hurt” until it loops back around. It doesn’t sound like a world-beating chart-topper, but neither did “Choosin’ Texas.” Maybe Ella’s just having her well-deserved moment.
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Ian Mathers: My primary problem last time was the lyrics, and at least they’re better here. More pop country could stand to look back at the whole countrypolitan sound, rather than just adding drops and autotune or whatever (not that I doubt modern production has graced this record). The result is fine. It’s just fine!
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Andrew Karpan: I was falling in love the other day, and it really opened me up to the bold and brassy possibilities of these Ella Langley records, the monumental acreage her voice occupies, the way it shines like the glimmer of the springtime sun. In some ways, it reminds me of my favorite Miranda Lambert records — those really annoying ones where she repeats something asinine over and over again in her honey-soft voice — but when Langley does it, it feels like something I’ve never heard before and have also been somehow listening to every day of my life, in a low rumble, never able to make out, right above the street. And that bassline? Kevin Parker, you can fold up your bangs and go back home.
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