Carly Rae Jepsen

With her new double album Day and Night, Carly Rae Jepsen dreams up a world lavish enough to hold the full expanse of her identity: the hopeless romantic and eternal pragmatist, the cult icon and global phenomenon, the chameleonic songwriter equally enchanted by indie idiosyncrasy and dance-pop spectacle. Over the course of 24 heart-on-sleeve songs, the diamond-selling superstar journeys through an ornate wonderland of otherworldly spaces—secret gardens, champagne-soaked palaces, jewel-like beaches, the Moon—all while remaining grounded in the raw emotional truth that’s always defined her output. Encompassing both sun-soaked left-field pop (Day) and after-hours dance music (Night), her new studio LP depicts a transformative moment in Jepsen’s life, spanning from the early days of dating her now-husband to the thrilling threshold of motherhood. But for all its extravagant scale, Day and Night brings her closer to the heart of her artistry than ever before—ultimately revealing a self-possessed pop luminary at her most adventurous and assured.

Her first new body of work since 2022’s The Loneliest Time (a Juno Award-nominated LP that landed on best-of-the-year lists from Rolling Stone, Consequence, and more), Day and Night marks the latest entry in a formidable catalog including standouts like 2015’s E*MO*TION—a culture-shaping milestone that earned massive praise from the likes of Pitchfork, who hailed it as “one of the best pop albums of the 21st century.” To create her most visionary work to date, Jepsen assembled a dream team of co-writers/producers, including Kyle Shearer (Slayyyter, Tove Lo), Nate Cyphert (The Head and the Heart, Hayley Kiyoko), Cole M.G.N. (Beck, Christine and the Queens), and Tavish Crowe (a longtime collaborator who co-wrote her GRAMMY-nominated blockbuster hit “Call Me Maybe”). As she documented a season of profound personal change, Jepsen found herself pulled toward two radically divergent sonic palettes: a kaleidoscopic form of folk-leaning pop, and forward-thinking dance music with a maximalist edge. “We realized the songs were moving in these very different directions, and at some point we asked, ‘What if we didn’t have to choose?’” she recalls. “The double-album approach felt really natural to me, and allowed me to play and experiment while creating something that still feels so unified.”

Just as each half of Day and Night inhabits its own elaborate musical universe, its songs often explore the same emotional territory from opposing vantage points. To that end, much of Day muses on the dawning of new love with a soul-searching sensitivity, while Night largely exists in a state of magnificently heightened sensation. Channeling a vast whirlwind of feelings—joy, anxiety, grief, transcendence—the result is a landmark achievement from a songwriter ineffably attuned to the bittersweet ache of love and longing. “As I was writing the album I was going through the very intense experience of falling in love and getting married and expecting a child, and it shifted how I thought about my whole life,” says Jepsen. “Before meeting my partner I’d had some complicated relationships and felt quite lonely for a long time, and I wanted to unpack how I got from there to here. A lot of these songs came from a very reflective place, but there’s also the celebration of moving on from a difficult period and arriving somewhere lovely.”

Day and Night opens on the euphoric momentum of “After All”: a bright and airy fantasia of romantic domesticity, spiking her surreal poetry with unfiltered confession (from the first verse: “Love is a peach / Taste it, this is an oasis / I want to call it home, right here, right now”). As Jepsen reveals, the lush and luminous track served as something of a personal manifestation. “When I wrote that song, I didn’t have any of the things I was singing about yet,” she says. “I’d spent so much of my life on this constant uphill climb that comes with being an artist, and eventually I realized there’s no real finish line to that. I started to imagine a quieter kind of life, living in a smaller space with a baby and a man and not much else to do, and ‘After All’ turned into my own little daydream of domestic bliss.”

As Day unfolds, Jepsen slips further into fantasy with “Versailles”—a gorgeously frenzied pop confection inspired by Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and its opulent portrait of unbridled pleasure-seeking. “So much of the Coppola version of Versailles is all fluff and fun and cake and silliness, and I wanted to make my own version of that inside a song about pursuing someone and feeling desperate in the best way possible,” she says. Next, “On Wires” tilts toward an epic urgency as Jepsen telegraphs the mind-warping rush of primal desire. “It’s about wanting someone so badly that you can barely handle pantomiming your way through the pleasantries of going out for the night,” she explains. “It’s a very ‘come hither’ song but the chorus is just me screaming ‘I want you’ over and over, because all I can think about is being alone in bed with this person.”

Although Day frequently embodies a feverish emotionality, Night dials up that intensity as Jepsen delves into the more shadowy dimensions of surrender and infatuation. A prime example of the album’s dazzling complexity, “Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor” delivers a potent meditation on fear of abandonment, spinning all that pain and heartache into a wildly ecstatic, club-ready banger. “I’d gone to see ABBA Voyage in London, and I came home with a mission of making my own ABBA-esque pop song—something with a perfect pop melody that makes you feel so good as soon as you turn it on,” Jepsen notes. Meanwhile, on “Motivation,” Night offers up one of the album’s most boldly candid moments: an incisive reflection on inherited patterns and the cost of becoming yourself, set against the hypnotic and glittering grandeur of a house-inspired backdrop. “That song started when I was back in my hometown in the fall, and the crunch of the leaves under my feet started creating this rhythm,” says Jepsen. “I was thinking about my family and how passionate we all are, how we have such high expectations of each other. ‘Motivation’ became my way of making peace with all of that—it’s our little family anthem that recognizes all the complicated parts, but I hope it can be an anthem for chosen families as well.”

As its tracklist moves from symphonic pop to dreamy psychedelia to high-octane disco, Day and Night echoes the palpable sense of playful abandon Jepsen experienced in bringing her most ambitious album to life. “As I’ve gotten older I’ve allowed myself more freedom with the lyrics and treated them almost like little poems, so where we landed is much more abstract than anything I’ve done before,” she says. “Instead of overthinking anything, I just trusted that we would find our way to whatever the album needed to be. One of the only real goals was to have every song represent a different flavor of all the music I love, whether that’s ABBA or Minnie Riperton or James Taylor or whoever else. I don’t see the point in trying to stay in one particular lane when you can make room for it all, and it felt so fun to celebrate that within all these songs.”

In granting herself permission to pursue her most unfettered instincts, Jepsen also made her way toward a deeper understanding of a powerful duality that’s long animated her songwriting. “Over the years I’ve had so many people tell me how joyful my music is, which has never completely made sense to me,” she says. “I’m glad that my songs have that effect on people, but I do rebel against the idea that my music is pure joy when really there’s a lot of melancholy under the surface.” And as she fully embraced those contradictions, Jepsen discovered a daring new confidence in her one-of-a-kind voice. “I feel like this album is me coming into my own,” she says. “I stopped worrying about whether something was going to work or not, and just followed what felt exciting. At this point, it’s kind of take it or leave it—this is who I am, and this is the music I want to make.”