Review: Anna Hay has been building toward this moment her whole life — and ‘It’s All Good’ is the song that proves it.
- 15 hours ago
- 2 min read
There’s something quietly devastating about the phrase “it’s all good.” We’ve all said it — usually when things are anything but. Anna Hay has built her new single around exactly that contradiction, and the result is one of the most relatably gut-punching pop-rock tracks you’ll hear this year.
The NYC-based singer-songwriter, originally from the German countryside, wrote the song about being in love with your best friend while watching them fall for someone else. It’s a specific kind of heartbreak — the kind where you smile and nod and say all the right things while something inside you quietly folds in on itself. She sums it up perfectly: the song is about “the three little words that lie between the three big ones — ‘I love you’, disguised by a nonchalant ‘it’s all good’.”
What makes the track land so well is how the sound mirrors the feeling. This is big, energetic pop-rock with a 2000s backbone — think the kind of record that hits you in the chest before the first chorus is even done. Hay co-produced alongside Farin Kautz with real attention to detail: live drum performances preserved as MIDI, layered electric guitars through a Kemper, and a last-minute baritone guitar addition suggested by David Bendeth (the producer behind Paramore’s Riot!) that anchors the whole thing. There’s also a recurring snare hit on the two that gives the song its restless, off-kilter pulse — entirely intentional, and entirely the point.
Photo Credit: Peter Demas
Raised in the German countryside, Hay started piano at nearly eight years old and was writing her own music by twelve. A first guitar at Christmas 2015, voice lessons at eighteen, a BFA and BA from The New School in NYC, and now — with a Berklee master’s in songwriting and production on the horizon — she is an artist who has put in every single hour. The influences are right there in her DNA: Taylor Swift’s emotional precision, Avril Lavigne’s fearlessness, Paramore’s raw, kinetic energy. And on ‘It’s All Good’, all of that comes together in the best way possible.
It’s an ache that Hay captures not just in the lyrics but in every production choice — co-produced with Farin Kautz, with electric drums tracked as MIDI to keep Logan Sidle’s live performance intact, guitars layered between Hay and Alex Lalli through a Kemper, and a baritone guitar addition from a name you’ll recognise: David Bendeth, the producer behind Paramore’s Riot!. That low-end locks in like a fist around your heart.
And then there’s the snare hit on the two — that rhythmic itch that gets under your skin from the first bar. When her guitarist questioned it, Hay shut it down immediately: “that is the whole thing about the song.” That’s the instinct of a real songwriter. That’s someone who knows exactly what she’s doing.
‘It’s All Good’ is out now
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