LOS ANGELES
An hour and 25 minutes, on purpose
There is a long-standing rule of thumb in the streaming era: make it short. Front-load the hooks. Keep the skip rate down. Nobody finishes a double album.
Carly Rae Jepsen appears to have read the rule and filed it somewhere unreachable. 'Day and Night', released on Friday 18 September through Schoolboy and Interscope, runs 24 tracks and 84 minutes and 48 seconds, split across two discs that do not sound much like each other on purpose. It is her eighth studio album and her first since 'The Loveliest Time' in 2023.
It is also, at the moment of writing, the best-received thing she has ever made.
Two records wearing one jacket
The architecture is the whole idea. Twelve songs represent the day; twelve represent the night. The first disc is the raw one — live instrumentation, room sound, a distinctly 1970s strain of psychedelic pop running under tracks like 'Versailles', 'Wild Child' and 'Just a Little Walk on the Moon'. The second disc is sleek and synthetic, a run of dance-pop built for the small hours: 'Don't Leave Me on the Dance Floor', 'Diver', 'No Labels, I Love You'.
The Line of Best Fit described the halves as 'raw' and then 'exploratory and intense', and the record as a whole as capturing a 'blurred, dreamlike sense of time' in which nights stretch into mornings and days dissolve back into nights. That is a grand claim for a pop album. It also happens to be a fair description of what the sequencing actually does.
Jepsen has been transparent about why she built it this way. 'I always knew I wanted to do one day was a double album,' she has said of the project, explaining that she found herself 'divided in these two different flavours of what I wanted to do musically, and the solution was sort of just why not do both at the same time?'
The B-sides problem, finally solved
To understand why this record matters to the people who care about Carly Rae Jepsen, you have to understand a peculiar pattern in her catalogue. Twice now — with 'Dedicated Side B' in 2020 and 'The Loveliest Time' in 2023 — the companion release of leftovers has been quietly adored by fans and critics who found it looser, weirder and more alive than the album it trailed.
She knows. 'Sometimes in the past, it would feel like the B-sides project was my personal favourite, which was sort of strange,' she told NME ahead of the release. 'But I felt less like I had to hide my freak flag on this album. It's purely a passion project.'
AllMusic's Heather Phares made the same point from the other direction, arguing that the sheer length of 'Day and Night' is what allows Jepsen to take the kind of risks she previously exiled to the companion discs. The freak flag, in other words, is now flying on the main record.
Who built it
The album was recorded between 2023 and 2025 while Jepsen toured internationally, with a core team that has been around her for years: longtime collaborator Tavish Crowe, producer Kyle Shearer, writer Nate Cyphert, and Cole M.G.N. — who is also her husband, and who produces 'Motivation'. The Swedish contingent that has shaped so much of her best work is here too: Noonie Bao, Patrik Berger, Markus Krunegard and Pontus Winnberg. In 2024 she was also spotted in the studio with the hyperpop architect A. G. Cook, a session whose fingerprints listeners have been hunting for since Friday.
The rollout was unusually patient. Jepsen announced the album on 22 June 2026 after weeks of cryptic social posts — photographs of objects and artefacts captioned with locations, dates and times, plus lines that looked suspiciously like lyrics. Four singles followed at roughly three-week intervals: 'On Wires' on 26 June, 'After All' on 16 July, 'Don't Leave Me on the Dance Floor' on 7 August and 'Motivation' on 21 August.
The verdict
Metacritic currently places 'Day and Night' at 83 out of 100 from ten critic scores — 'universal acclaim', and the highest-rated album of Jepsen's career.
Rolling Stone's Jaeden Pinder gave it four stars out of five and called it a 'dissertation on love', writing that it is Jepsen's most experimental and exhilarating work and that she 'makes falling in love feel brand-new all over again'. Sam Franzini at The Line of Best Fit called it her 'most creative and far-reaching work to date'.
The dissent, where it exists, is about scale rather than quality. Several reviewers have noted that 84 minutes is a lot of anything, that the 'Day' half takes the bigger swings, and that a double album is by definition a record with unequal halves. That is a criticism the format has attracted since 1966 and is unlikely to shake off now.
What this means for you
If you have not thought about Carly Rae Jepsen since 'Call Me Maybe' — and statistically, a great many people have not — this is an odd and rewarding place to rejoin. The woman who made the most inescapable single of 2012 has spent the fourteen years since building one of the most quietly respected catalogues in mainstream pop, largely by refusing to chase the thing that made her famous.
A practical suggestion: do not listen to 'Day and Night' on shuffle. The whole conceit collapses. Play disc one in the morning and disc two after dark, which is what the tracklist is asking you to do, and the record does something that very few 84-minute albums manage — it earns its length.
What comes next
Jepsen plays the All Things Go Music Festival on 27 September, her first live appearance of the year and the first chance anyone will get to hear these songs in a field.
Twenty-four tracks is a statement of confidence. On the evidence of the first weekend, it was warranted.
