Day and Night

Since she unleashed her unabashedly earnest breakthrough single “Call Me Maybe”, <b>Carly Rae Jepsen</b> has become something of a cult hero to legions of fellow piners and yearners. That status was further cemented with 2015’s <i>E•MO•TION</i>, the album that brought Jepsen out of the shadow of her biggest hit and crowned her as the queen of the last millennial romantics. Since then, the pop perfectionist has found an outlet for her prolific writing (she whittled down <i>E•MO•TION</i> from over 200 tracks) by pairing her albums with full-length companion pieces—<i>Dedicated</i> and <i>Dedicated Side B</i>, <i>The Loneliest Time</i> and <i>The Loveliest Time</i>, both pairs culling from the same expansive batch of tracks. But Jepsen’s eighth album, <i>Day and Night</i>, may be her most ambitious yet—a 24-track double album inspired by marriage and motherhood. (In 2025, Jepsen married the producer Cole M.G.N., whom she met at a songwriting session; earlier in 2026, they welcomed their first child.) “I don’t even know if I set out to make a double album, it just started to become what I was creating,” Jepsen tells Apple Music. “I really love to create a world and a whole experience, and take you somewhere. And I think my tastes were sort of diverged in two distinct places—one that was more organic, with live instruments, and then something that felt a little darker and nighttime and synth-based. Day and night became the obvious distinction.” Thus the sprawling record is split between two moods: The chiller <i>Day</i> side draws from ’60s folk and ’70s psychedelia for gently trippy love songs with organic textures and a tinge of melancholia. Meanwhile the <i>Night</i> side opens with a fat bassline and a dose of cowbell, setting the mood for a suite of songs that channel French house, Italo disco and ABBA—occasionally all at once, as on <b>“Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor”</b>, an instant crying-in-the-club classic for sweating out a conflict. But if there’s an emotional centre, it’s <b>“After All”</b>, a song that functioned for Jepsen as a manifestation. “I was writing this song before I was engaged, before we had the baby. It was just an idea,” she explains. “But then when we shot the video, I was all of those things. We’d locked it in. We were married. I was nine months pregnant when shooting this, and my husband was there dancing with me. And it was just sort of wild to have written this idea, and then get to celebrate it in real life together.”