What started as a taunt – famously leaving nearly 200 tracks on the cutting room floor, including a scrapped album called Disco Sweat – has turned into a tradition. Starting with a muscular collection of B-sides for her landmark Emotion (2015), then a companion LP for Dedicated (2019), she eventually dropped all pretensions and released The Loveliest Time (2023) a year after The Loneliest Time, as an album all on its own.
With her enormous new double record, Day and Night, she take the next logical step, throwing out 24 crystal-clean tracks right off the bat, whipping from the psychedelic, artsy Day to the freewheeling, clubby Night. Certainly her most mature release to date, it’s got some of her best, most burning songs, too.
Now 40, married, and recently a mum, you might wonder if her passion for music has dimmed to a low, constant flame. But if anything, the opposite is true, as evidenced not only by the tracklist length, but also “After All”, Day and Night’s opening single, which makes her views clear: creativity and stability aren’t mutually exclusive but intertwined, one feeding the other.
“Lock the doors, stop the world, start the inspiration”, she sings, her voice lifting to transcendence. It’s a mini disco perfect for an infant’s early night: you can tell she’s satisfied with, simply, “Baby, one bedroom apartment, daddy and me.” On the other hand, this is a Jepsen that, for the first time, is comfy spitting “I fucking hate you” on an album (on the searing “Something Tragic”). So, no, domestic bliss has not distracted pop’s patron saint of big feelings.
Though other singer/songwriters like Olivia Rodrigo and Gracie Abrams often describe love as an unbearable pain, or a knife in one’s side, Jepsen knows that it’s much easier, and more truthful, to liken it to a vacation: wind blowing in your hair under blue skies, an Italian getaway, getting felt up in a sundress. Day and Night is remarkably relaxed, a kick-your-feet-up album whose author is living the good life and wants nothing more than to tell you about it. To hell with responsibilities: “If you want to, we can sleep in for the third time this weekend,” she says on “Habits of Creatures”, filled with the momentous humdrum of sharing a beautiful life.
Day and Night is less punchy than heavyweight champs like Emotion or Dedicated, but its passion doesn’t run dry. “Burning Heart”, the record’s first thumper, flips the typical Jepsen narrative. She has a million songs about her poor, aching heart, but this one focuses on her partner’s. “I see flames in your eyes,” she says, awash in his glow, finally going toe-to-toe. Often it reduces her to the purest language possible: “I wanna end with you,” she sings. And what can be more final than that?
The quirky, era-blending, and BPM-shifting “Versailles” sees her running through the gardens naked to feel something, with a dorky, mid-2010s chant-along chorus like a grown-up version of Jepsen’s own “Good Time”. Slowing down to attest her desire to feel good, bad, and desperate, in that order, feels like a motto for her career thus far, and it’s no different in this album. For Jepsen, any emotion – even despair – is worth feeling.
She’s always been a pure pop connoisseur, but the experimentation she chased on The Loneliest / Loveliest Time continues here on Day and Night, with some of her most exotic songs to date. The icy, driving beat of “Amalfi Coast” wouldn’t be out of place on Kylie Minogue’s Fever. Its titular Italian cliffside may be too lax, though. This is one to speed down the Pacific Coast Highway to.
Later, there’s a touch of the artsy electronica of Madonna’s Ray of Light on the Ibizan chillout house track “Near or Far”, certainly in her huskier delivery and cosmic infatuation. Even “Motivation”, a typical house anthem, comes across askew with its lines of gratitude and familial pride. “That’s my street, that’s my friend I rely on”, she brags, sort of like The Wiggles meets Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul”. “Super Sage”, meanwhile, is a shimmering, ocean-deep punch of devotion that goes further than Jepsen has dared to before, infused with dreamy whispers, glitchy synths, and underwater plonks, coalescing into a mesmerising finale. “We faced the night and we’re still alive”, she winks.
Any Carly Rae Jepsen record is stuffed with enough infatuation to make your heart burst, but Day and Night takes it to new levels. Though she says it’s “an honour to be blessed with simplicity” on “You Don’t Know How It Feels” (“…to be in your arms,” goes the full sentence), she’s constantly wanting more from her partner – more days, more nights, more time, not due to his withholding but the impossibility of it ever being enough.
“I’ve walked too far without you now, I fear,” she says on “Wild Child”, a folky, finger-plucked love song so pure and raw it might just make you tear up. And for an opposite vibe, the wonky “Patience Power Passion” offers a new formula for life: an alliterative motto with the juice to overtake Reduce Reuse Recycle.
Day and Night’s fascinating dualities – wide-eyed, reality-shattering mysticisms and bare-bones mundanities – collide in what is probably her most literary work (the book she’s clutching on the cover is Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing). “I was thinking we could shower and then take a walk,” she’ll say, then “get busy thinking that the world is our creation.” She’ll crave “you you you you you” on both “Good Fine Alright” and “On Wires”, talking about an ex the first time, and her now-husband the next.
The double album format allows her to get playful, cross sentiments, and toy with her own feelings as much as her reputation for having them. Day and Night is another notch in the belt of one of pop’s best flag-bearers. Grown up but never stiff, it’s Carly Rae Jepsen’s most creative and far-reaching work to date.