Tony Hannah's debut album Love It Or Leave It looks back to eighties country

Tony Hannah has put out a first album, Love It Or Leave It, and Saving Country Music opened its review of it on 26 August 2026 with a line most reviews cannot use: the record does not need an argument made for it. You press play and the eighties and nineties soft country sound does the rest. The score was 8.3 out of 10.

Hannah is a preacher's daughter from East Tennessee. Before music she spent time working on farms in California and modelling in New York. The review's description of where she has landed is a honky tonk angel singing for the broken hearted, which is a role more than a biography, and the record mostly plays it straight rather than winking at it.

The method is subtraction. Hannah and producer Elijah Ocean keep the songs plain, with nothing gratuitous added and almost no instrumental solos, though the playing throughout is exact and tasteful. The review is explicit that this is not the standard neotraditional nineties revival with blazing Telecaster runs and neon sign imagery. The pair go looking in the corners of that era other acts skip.

The names the review reaches for are Patty Loveless and a little Juice Newton, and it says the album is not scared of the eighties or the Urban Cowboy period either. The sparseness and the intent behind it remind the writer of Tony Brown's production at his peak. While younger acts try to reenact nineties country word for word, the argument goes, Hannah is writing songs with no date stamped on them.

Every song on the album is written or co-written by her, with one exception. An Old Pair of Shoes was originally cut by Randy Travis and was written by her late uncle, AJ Masters, which makes the only outside song on the record a family document. The rest is personal in the ordinary sense: a young woman trying to find love, trying to make ends meet each month, trying to work out where she fits.

The review picks out Easy on the Eyes, a half-time song co-written with Stefanie Joyce, and the track that follows it, What The Heart Wants, as the places she admits she is not in control of the moment. It saves its biggest claim for It Takes a Man to Say Goodbye, written with Brennen Leigh. Released in 1987 on a major label, the review says, that song would be a permanent standard, and it argues the song deserves to be treated as one now.

The single complaint is about reaching. When the record tries to be more expressive, as on the chorus of Hollywood with its unusual chord choice, the review says the magic starts to weaken. Hannah does not have a towering voice or an enviable range. What she has is tone, and the review's case is that she writes and records to serve it, because the sweetness in it is disarming and pulls sympathy out of a listener.

The closing argument is about attention rather than quality. The release cycle is crowded, Dolly Parton had just died and everyone was eulogising her, and picking a fight remains the reliable way to get noticed. A quiet debut deserves the same racket, the review says, as an act that has just cussed out another performer on Instagram.

So: a first album with no solos, no gimmick and one borrowed song written by the singer's uncle. Love It Or Leave It sits with the rest of the country records we are tracking in the release calendar, alongside Kaitlin Butts and Hello, Honky Tonk in October and Stella Lefty's first album Long Way Home.