Day and Night — Carly Rae Jepsen

Schoolboy / Interscope · 18 September 2026 · 6/10

There is something genuinely admirable about Carly Rae Jepsen refusing to do the sensible thing. After Emotion made her a critical darling and a meme simultaneously, after The Loneliest Time proved she could still write a perfect three-minute pop song in her sleep, the rational next move would have been to consolidate — a tight eleven-tracker, another round of glowing Pitchfork scores, another sold-out run of intimate venues. Instead she’s handed us 24 songs split across two conceptual discs, inspired by marriage and motherhood and blurred, dreamlike time, and titled the whole thing Day and Night. It is, to be fair, exactly the kind of swinging-for-the-fences ambition we want from pop artists. It’s just a shame the fence is so far away that she doesn’t always reach it.

The premise is clean enough: the Day disc deals in organic, live-instrumented, psychedelic pop with a warm, unhurried quality; the Night disc shifts into sleek, synth-driven dance music, exploratory and occasionally dark. In practice, the division works better in theory than in execution. The Day side, at its best, is genuinely gorgeous. “Versailles” is the album’s crowning moment — an unusual, slow-building piece that alludes to Marie Antoinette’s excess while Jepsen writes with extraordinary vulnerability about the terror of impermanence inside happiness. Its structure is deliberately strange: it builds and builds and then pulls back for the chorus, letting the restraint do the emotional heavy lifting. It’s the kind of song that justifies the entire double-album gamble on its own.

“On Wires,” the lead single, earns its place as the front door to the record. Beginning as a deceptively simple piano groove before guitars erupt into the chorus with almost violent warmth, it sets up the Day disc’s whole argument: that settled, committed love is not a lesser subject for pop music, just an underexplored one. Jepsen has spent her career cataloguing desire and longing with almost obsessive precision, so watching her redirect that precision towards keeping rather than wanting is a genuinely interesting gear change.

“Nights stretch into mornings and days dissolve into nights” — it’s not a lyric so much as a manifesto for what the record is attempting, and when it works, you feel it physically.

Then there’s “Burning Heart,” a new wave rocker that sounds like it was recorded in 1984 in the best possible way — saxophone solo and all, sitting somewhere between Prefab Sprout and a particularly well-produced Radio 2 fever dream. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet here we are.

The Night disc is where things get more complicated, and not always in the productive way. “Amalfi Coast” is an unambiguous triumph — deep house production of genuine pedigree, the kind of track that makes you reconsider whether Jepsen has been holding back a clubbing addiction this entire time. The vocal samples are used with restraint, the kicks hit exactly as hard as they should, and for six minutes or so you’re entirely convinced this was the direction she should have committed to years ago. “Hold Me to the Light,” built on a UK garage shuffle, similarly succeeds by trusting its production instincts completely. Nia Archives, who we praised for doing something similar with more grit, would nod approvingly.

But the Night disc also houses the record’s worst instincts. Tracks like “Motivation” and “Patience Power Passion” feel like they exist to fill the quota rather than justify the runtime, landing in a vague middle ground between dance music and pop without fully committing to either. There’s a version of “Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor” that could have been a career-defining single — the anxiety of watching a perfect night end is exactly the kind of emotional specificity Jepsen does better than almost anyone — but its production feels undercooked relative to what “Amalfi Coast” demonstrates she’s capable of on the same record.

This is ultimately the central tension with Day and Night: it contains some of Jepsen’s best work and some of her most clearly padded. A 24-track double album demands a kind of sustained creative pressure that very few artists can maintain, and even Robyn, who has built an entire reputation on each release meaning something, would probably baulk at that ask. At around the 16-track mark, you start feeling the seams. “No Labels, I Love You” and “Super Sage” are perfectly pleasant ways to close a record you’ve already emotionally checked out of.

It’s worth noting that this is also an album documenting something genuinely unfamiliar for Jepsen: contentment. The yearning that powered Emotion and its B-sides was so specific it became almost mythological. The challenge of Day and Night is that yearning to keep a moment alive is, by definition, a quieter and less cinematically useful emotion than yearning for something you don’t yet have. When she finds the language for it — on “Versailles,” on “On Wires,” on the lovely, aching “Lonely Side of the Bed” — it’s moving in a way that her earlier work rarely was. When she doesn’t, you’re left with competent filler from an artist you know is capable of extraordinary things.

Kacey Musgraves faced a version of this same problem on Middle of Nowhere, trying to translate personal transformation into pop music without losing the tension that made her interesting. The results there were similarly uneven. It seems contentment is genuinely hard to write about without occasionally boring your audience, even when you’re this talented.

Day and Night is not the masterpiece the ambition suggests it wants to be, but it is proof that Jepsen is one of the few pop artists still genuinely interested in taking risks rather than just managing a legacy — and on the nights it gets it right, it’s worth every one of its 24 tracks.