Some pop stars change their sound every album to stay interesting. Carly Rae Jepsen changes it so she can stay herself. When we first wrote about her in 2022 she had just made a quiet, self-reflective record called The Loneliest Time. Four years later she is married, a mother, and out with a 24-track double album. I’d call that a busy stretch even for someone who once wrote a whole album about the word “maybe”.
Here is what has changed since that album, and what hasn’t.
The new album: Day and Night
Jepsen announced Day and Night on June 22, 2026, and released it on September 18 through Schoolboy and Interscope. It is her eighth studio album and her first double album: 12 songs for day, 12 for night. Going by the label’s description, the Day half leans on “live instrumentation and hints of 70s-inspired psychedelic pop”, while the Night half moves into a “sleek, synth-driven world of dance pop.” Her collaborators included Tavish Crowe, Kyle Shearer, Nate Cyphert and Cole M.G.N., whom you will meet properly in a moment.
The singles came out over the summer: “On Wires” (June 26), “After All”, “Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor” and “Motivation”. On October 9 she issued Day and Night (Continued), which adds eight more songs from the same sessions, along with a new single, “Love Depressed”. Critics liked it: it holds a Metacritic score of 82, the best of her career.
My read: twenty-four songs sounds like a lot until you remember that this is the artist who keeps releasing B-sides for albums that already had too many good songs. The surplus is the brand.
How we got here: the Loneliest and Loveliest years
The Loneliest Time, her sixth album, came out in October 2022. It mixed 80s pop, disco and folk, and Jepsen described it as more self-reflective than anything she had done before. She took it on the road as The So Nice Tour. In July 2023 she followed it with a companion record, The Loveliest Time, which is the same trick Day and Night now plays inside a single release.
The pattern is easy to spot once you look for it. She likes pairs: lonely and lovely, day and night. I find that more honest than the usual “reinvention” press release. The mood changes and the person stays the same.
The videos everyone still knows
The song that started it all is “Call Me Maybe” (2011). It got its big push when Justin Bieber shared it with his followers, and he and his manager Scooter Braun then signed her to Schoolboy Records, the same label on the spine of Day and Night. The video, about a girl trying to get the attention of the boy next door who turns out to be uninterested, now has well over a billion views on YouTube.
Then came “I Really Like You” in 2015, the video where Tom Hanks lip-syncs the whole song through his day and Bieber turns up for the dance at the end.
Honestly, casting Tom Hanks as yourself is still the smartest music video decision of the decade, and nobody has topped it.
Married to the producer, and now a mother
Jepsen has always kept her private life fairly private. Earlier relationships, including one with producer Matthew Koma, rarely made headlines. That changed in the nicest way. She met producer Cole M.G.N. (Cole Marsden Greif-Neill) through work, announced their engagement on Instagram in September 2024, and married him on October 4, 2025, at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City. She confirmed the wedding on Instagram later that month.
On November 3, 2025, she posted black-and-white photos of the two of them with the caption “Oh hi baby.” In March 2026 she introduced their daughter in an Instagram Story with a photo of herself holding the baby and the line “Last 2 weeks have been the best of my life.” She has not shared the baby’s name publicly, and we won’t guess.
What I notice is the order of operations. She got married, had a baby and still finished a double album, with her husband in the credits. That’s a family business with very good synths.
The stage and screen side
Jepsen got her start on Canadian Idol in 2007, where she finished third, so a stage was never far away. In 2014 she played the title role in Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella on Broadway. In 2016 she played Frenchy in Fox’s Grease: Live and voiced Odette in the animated film Ballerina (released in the US as Leap!). It is a short list, but everything on it is musical. She knows exactly where her strengths are.
What’s next: the Day and Night Tour
On October 1, 2026, Jepsen announced the Day and Night Tour, 26 cities across the US and Canada from April 15 to May 29, 2027. That gives her six months between the announcement and opening night, which in new-parent time is about a week and a half.
Back in 2022, The Loneliest Time looked like a pop star getting quiet and thoughtful. Looking back, I think she was clearing space. The loneliest time turned into the loveliest time, then into a wedding at the Chelsea and a baby girl, and the music got bigger, not smaller. She still asks the same question she asked in 2011. The difference is that this time someone actually called.
Sources
- Carly Rae Jepsen on Instagram: Day and Night Tour announcement, October 2026
- Carly Rae Jepsen on Instagram (@carlyraejepsen): engagement, wedding, pregnancy and birth posts
- Carly Rae Jepsen – I Really Like You (official video, CarlyRaeJepsenVEVO)
- Variety: Carly Rae Jepsen announces double album Day and Night (June 2026)
- The Fader: Carly Rae Jepsen is returning with a 24-track double album (June 22, 2026)
- Rolling Stone: Day and Night (Continued) B-sides (October 2026)
- People: Carly Rae Jepsen announces 2027 Day and Night Tour (October 2026)
- Metacritic: Day and Night reviews
- Billboard Canada: Carly Rae Jepsen welcomes baby with husband Cole M.G.N. (March 2026)
- AOL: Carly Rae Jepsen expecting first child with Cole M.G.N.: “Oh hi baby” (November 2025)
- Castanet: Carly Rae Jepsen gets married to Cole MGN (October 2025)
