Carly Rae Jepsen releases double album Day and Night featuring 24 tracks

Carly Rae Jepsen has released her eighth studio album: Day and Night, a double album featuring 24 tracks and over a hundred minutes of music in total. On this new record, the Canadian pop star showcases two clearly distinct sides of herself. The day half of the album is built around organic, live instrumentation and seventies inspired psychedelic pop, while the night half revolves around synth driven dance pop. Contributors to the project include Tavish Crowe, Kyle Shearer, Nate Cyphert and Cole M.G.N., among others.

Jepsen told Billboard News that the idea of making a double album had been on her mind for a while. "I always knew I wanted to do one day was a double album, and if not now, then when, really," the singer said. "I was kind of divided in these two different flavors of what I wanted to do musically, and the solution was sort of just why not do both at the same time? So Day and Night was born." The answer to her musical dilemma turned out to be simple: release both directions at once.

The single "On Wires" was the first taste of the album and stands out for its brooding character. Jepsen wrote the track together with Nate Cyphert and Kyle Shearer and describes it as a journey of discovery into new musical territory. "I hadn't really done anything quite like 'On Wires' before," she said, "and I think, you know, as a musician who's been in this for a while now, that's so exciting to land on, like, a new genre to play with that maybe you haven't dabbled in before and to figure out how to make it your own." She added that the team already had a feeling they were onto something special while writing the song. Alongside "On Wires", the album was preceded by the singles "After All", "Don't Leave Me on the Dance Floor" and "Motivation".

One of the most striking tracks on the album is "Versailles", which also received a music video. The song was inspired by Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette and was written together with Elias Kapari, Noonie Bao and Markus Krunegård, with production by Kapari. The accompanying video was directed by Kanya Iwana and filmed in Los Angeles, where Jepsen is seen dancing at a party while imagining herself in the famous French palace.

Day and Night is the follow up to The Loveliest Time from 2023. Jepsen broke through worldwide in 2012 with "Call Me Maybe", which spent nine weeks at the top of the American Billboard Hot 100 and became the first of her six entries on that chart. In 2016 she released the critically acclaimed album EMOTION, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary with an expanded reissue featuring the new tracks "More", "Guardian Angel", "Back Of My Heart" and "Lost In Devotion". In total she has charted five albums on the American albums chart.

Outside of music, it has also been a busy period for Jepsen. In March of this year she became a mother, welcoming a baby boy named Ilya together with her husband Cole Marsden Greif Neill, also known as Cole M.G.N. On top of that, it was announced last month that she is writing the music and lyrics for an upcoming Broadway musical based on the film 10 Things I Hate About You, collaborating with Grammy winner Ethan Gruska, known for his work with boygenius.