Carly Rae Jepsen Split Her New Album Into Twelve Days and Twelve Nights

Most pop albums pick a mood. Carly Rae Jepsen has made one album with two, and split them down the middle.

Day and Night arrives on 18 September through Schoolboy and Interscope: a double album of twenty-four tracks across two discs, twelve songs for daytime and twelve for night.

Two Records in One Sleeve

The split is structural rather than thematic decoration. One disc is called Day and the other Night, and the material on each is built differently.

The first half has been described by The Line of Best Fit as “raw”, featuring live instrumentation and elements of 1970s-inspired psychedelic pop. The second is “exploratory and intense”, resembling a sleek, synth-driven dance-pop sound.

Those are genuinely different records. Live-band psychedelia and programmed dance-pop have different rhythmic logic, different production priorities and, usually, different audiences — which is why most artists choose one.

The stated aim is a “blurred, dreamlike sense of time”, where “nights stretch into mornings” and “days dissolve into nights”. That is a more interesting frame than it first sounds, because it means the two halves are supposed to bleed rather than sit as opposites.

Twenty-four tracks is a lot by any standard, and a hard twelve-and-twelve division is unusually rigid. It suggests the structure was decided before the tracklist was finalised, which is the opposite of how a double album is normally assembled from an overflow of material.

The two-disc framing is also a physical-format decision in an era that barely has one. Streaming flattens a double album into a single long list, so naming the halves is the only way the distinction survives the medium most people will hear it in.

That gives the vinyl and CD editions a real function rather than a collector’s one. On those formats the split is enforced by the object itself — you have to get up and change something to cross from day into night, which is exactly the transition the record is about.

Three Years of Writing on Tour

The record was made across 2023 to 2025, and the circumstances explain both its length and its range. Following The Loveliest Time in 2023, Jepsen kept writing and recording new material while touring internationally.

Writing on the road produces a particular kind of catalogue: songs written in different cities, in different states of tiredness, with no unifying session to impose a sound. That is the raw material a day-and-night split can organise.

It also explains why a twenty-four-track album is possible at all. Three years of continuous writing generates far more than a standard twelve-song record can hold, and the alternative to a double is discarding half of it.

In August 2025 she marked the tenth anniversary of her third album, Emotion, with a one-night-only celebration — a reminder of how much of her reputation still rests on a record from 2015.

That anniversary is relevant to what came next. An artist celebrating a decade-old album has a choice between leaning on it and answering it, and a twenty-four-track double is unambiguously the second.

Cryptic Posts With Times Attached

The rollout began obliquely. In the weeks before the announcement, Jepsen posted cryptic messages on social media featuring images accompanied by locations, dates and times.

The images included photographs of artifacts and objects, alongside lines resembling lyrics from the record. Attaching specific times to them is the detail that connects the campaign to the album’s concept — a record organised by hours announced with timestamps.

Puzzle campaigns are common enough now to be a genre of their own, and most of them are decorative. This one at least encodes the album’s structure, which is a better use of the format than a countdown.

Our piece on why synth pop does well on playlists covers the distribution reality a twenty-four-track album now has to survive.

Four Singles Across Eight Weeks

The release campaign has been heavy. “On Wires” arrived on 26 June, “After All” on 16 July, “Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor” on 7 August and “Motivation” on 21 August.

Four singles in under two months is more than most albums get in a year. For a twenty-four-track record it is proportionate: four songs is a sixth of the album, which is roughly the same share of a normal record that one single represents.

The titles also do some signalling. “Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor” belongs unmistakably to the night half; “On Wires” and “After All” suggest something quieter.

Leading with the lead single in late June, nearly three months before release, is a long campaign by current standards. It is also the only way to introduce two distinct sonic halves without one of them arriving as a surprise.

A Production Team, Not a Producer

The credits are spread wide, which is what a double album demands. Production is shared between CJ Baran, Arthur Besnainou, Cole M.G.N. and Kyle Shearer.

The wider collaborator list runs to Tavish Crowe, Kyle Shearer, Nate Cyphert and Cole M.G.N. — who is also Jepsen’s husband — along with Noonie Bao, Patrik Berger, Markus Krunegard and Pontus Winnberg.

The Swedish contingent there is notable. Berger, Bao and Winnberg come from the tradition that has shaped a large share of the last two decades of pop songwriting, and their presence points squarely at the synth-driven half.

Tavish Crowe is the other end of the spectrum. He co-wrote the song that made Jepsen internationally famous and has been in her orbit since the beginning, which anchors the record to the people who were there before any of it happened.

A team this size is the practical answer to twenty-four tracks. No single producer shapes two records’ worth of material in three years while the artist is touring, and the division of labour is presumably what allowed the two halves to sound as different as they are meant to.

She also spent time in the studio during 2024 and 2025 with the British producer A. G. Cook, though what came of that session has not been detailed. On an album with a maximalist half, that is a name worth noting.

One Show, Nine Days Later

The live plan is deliberately minimal. The album’s release will be followed by a headlining performance at the All Things Go Music Festival on 27 September — her first live appearance of the year.

A single festival headline slot nine days after release is not a tour; it is a statement that the record comes first. For an artist who spent three years writing while touring, sitting out the year before release makes sense.

It also raises an unresolved question. Twenty-four tracks divided into two moods is a structure built for a full-evening show, and a single festival set cannot represent it — a festival slot is roughly an hour, which is one disc.

Whether a touring version follows is the thing to watch. An album that organises itself around the passage of a day is the rare pop record with an obvious staging concept built in, and playing half of it at a festival leaves that idea on the table.

Eight albums in, with a fanbase that has followed her from mainstream ubiquity into a long and much stranger second act, Jepsen has made the most structurally ambitious record of her career. Whether twenty-four songs is generous or excessive is a question only the finished thing can answer.

Day and Night is out on 18 September through Schoolboy and Interscope Records.