Carly Rae Jepsen Is Back With a 24-Track Double Album. The First Single Dropped Today.

Carly Rae Jepsen has not released a proper album since July 2023. On Friday she ended that stretch with the first single from a record that is twice the size of anything she has put out before.

"On Wires" arrived today, June 26. It is the lead single from "Day and Night," a 24-track double album due September 18 through 604, School Boy and Interscope. Jepsen announced the project on June 22 after a few weeks of cryptic social posts, images tagged with locations, dates and times that her fans, a famously thorough bunch, decoded almost immediately.

The structure is the actual news here. "Day and Night" breaks cleanly into two halves of 12 songs each. Per the announcement, the "Day" side is "organic and raw," built on live instrumentation with a streak of '70s-inspired psychedelic pop. The "Night" side shifts into "a sleek, synth-driven world of dance pop." One disc for the band in the room, one for the machines after the sun goes down. It is a tidy concept, and on paper it splits Jepsen's two instincts down the middle: the warm singer-songwriter who came up playing guitar, and the synth-pop maximalist who turned 2015's "Emotion" into a cult record.

A double album that her catalog was always heading toward

A 24-track release is a flex, and from most pop artists it would read as bloat. From Jepsen it reads as honesty. She has always made more songs than fit. "Emotion" got a 2016 companion EP, "Emotion: Side B," that some fans rate above the parent album. Her 2022 record "The Loneliest Time" came paired a year later with "The Loveliest Time," a full companion built largely from its leftovers. The woman does not throw songs away. A deliberate two-disc album with a day half and a night half is the logical endpoint for a writer who has spent a decade insisting her B-sides deserved better than the vault.

The risk is the same one every double album carries. Twenty-four tracks is a lot of room to fill, and the format has buried more careers than it has crowned. The split gives her an out. If the "Day" side is the looser, live-band material and "Night" is the dancefloor, a listener can take them as two separate moods rather than one 80-minute sit.

Who she made it with

Jepsen built the record with a small circle. Tavish Crowe, who co-wrote "Call Me Maybe" with her back in 2011 and has been in her orbit ever since, is on it. So are Kyle Shearer, Nate Cyphert and Cole M.G.N., the producer she married last year. Reporting around the announcement also placed her in the studio with British producer A.G. Cook, the PC Music architect who has spent the last few years sanding the edges off hyperpop for major-label clients. If that session made the final cut, the "Night" side is where you would expect to hear it.

The rollout starts in September

Jepsen will launch the album live by headlining New York's All Things Go Festival on September 27, her first performance of 2026 and the top slot on a bill that also includes Zara Larsson, Lola Young, Brandi Carlile and Muna.

As for "On Wires" itself, it landed only hours ago, so the early verdict belongs to the people streaming it right now rather than to anyone claiming to have lived with it. What it has to do is the job every lead single has: prove the concept is more than a press-release sentence. The album does not arrive until September. The framing tells you more than the single can yet, and the framing is the most ambitious thing Jepsen has announced in years.