Carly Rae Jepsen Arrives Into a New Chapter — and She Brings 24 Songs With Her

There is an argument to be made that Carly Rae Jepsen has spent the better part of a decade quietly becoming one of the most important songwriters working in pop music. Not loudly, not through the machinery of constant releases and relentless promotional cycles, but through the accumulated weight of an instinct for emotional truth that her audience recognized long before the critical establishment caught up. With “On Wires,” the lead single from her forthcoming double album Day and Night, released June 26 via 604, Schoolboy, and Interscope Records, Jepsen arrives into what is clearly her most expansive chapter yet, and she sounds completely ready for it.

The song was released alongside the announcement of Day and Night, a 24-track double album set for release on September 18 that captures a blurred, dreamlike sense of time where nights stretch into mornings and days dissolve into nights, creating a feeling of being suspended inside a moment. Within that 24-hour structure, “On Wires” lands in the day period, a suite of bright, raw songs exuding an organic warmth. It is the right place to open. The song carries the particular luminosity of early morning feeling, of something new and slightly terrifying beginning to take shape.

Opening with staccato piano, the chorus explodes into an arena rock declaration that soars heavenward, with Jepsen’s voice ascending with god-like reverb amidst dramatic blasts of guitar distortion. Critics have already reached for superlatives. Alex Hudson of Exclaim! called the song “a bold collision of sounds” that is “mysterious and full of surprises,” while Alex Krinsky of Consequence of Sound noted that “only moments pass before the complexity and quality of production become apparent.” That last observation is particularly accurate. “On Wires” rewards close listening in a way that her best songs always have, revealing layers on the second and third pass that the first hearing only hints at.

Jepsen wrote the song with frequent collaborators Kyle Shearer, who also produced it, and Nate Cyphert. The track centers on the point where friendship begins to turn into romance, framing the first stages of courtship through a feeling of impatience and uncertainty. That territory is one Jepsen has mapped before, but here the production stakes are higher, the emotional scale larger. It feels like the kind of song she has been building toward rather than one she has simply written in the moment.

The music video, directed by Caio Viera and shot in Los Angeles, explores a different but equally resonant tension: the tug-of-war between motherhood and career. Fighting to carve out space for both, Jepsen grabs a microphone and, with its long cord trailing behind her, ventures out from a club and into the world. The image of a woman literally dragging the tools of her art out into the street while navigating the pull of domestic life is one of the more quietly striking visual statements a music video has produced this year. It does not explain itself, which is exactly right.

What makes the video even more remarkable is the circumstances under which it was made. Jepsen shot it in her sixth month of pregnancy, and she has since spoken with characteristic humor about how the original concept had to be rethought entirely. “I pictured chasing this man through the streets of New York,” she explained, “but then, by the time we shot the video, I was like, ‘How do I chase a man through the streets when I’m six months pregnant? It would look like I’m looking for child support!'” She gave birth to her first child in March 2026.

The personal context gives Day and Night a dimension that goes beyond the musical ambition of the project itself. Jepsen worked on the double album with a circle of close collaborators and friends, including Tavish Crowe, Kyle Shearer, Nate Cyphert, and Cole M.G.N., whom she married last year. The album’s description as her most expansive artistic statement to date carries extra weight when you understand that it was made during one of the most expansive personal periods of her life, a marriage, a pregnancy, a child arriving in March, and now a 24-song record that asks the listener to follow her through an entire 24 hours of feeling.

For an artist whose history with ambitious projects runs deep, all of this still manages to feel like something genuinely new. Her 2015 album E•MO•TION has surpassed one billion streams worldwide. “Call Me Maybe,” from 2012’s Kiss, topped charts in more than 47 countries and earned two Grammy nominations, including Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance. She has released companion side projects for two consecutive albums and co-written the stage musical adaptation of 10 Things I Hate About You alongside Lena Dunham. In short, Jepsen has never been someone who does the expected thing, and Day and Night continues that pattern at the largest scale she has attempted.

She will launch the album with a headline performance at New York City’s All Things Go Festival on September 27, her first live performance of 2026. That show will mark the moment when everything she has been building in private — the songs, the structure, the vision of a 24-hour emotional landscape — becomes something shared. Given what “On Wires” already sounds like on its own, the full picture is going to be worth every second of the wait.