This time Carly Rae Jepsen has gone all in from the outset. Instead of releasing a new album first and, a few months later, its B‑side—as she had been doing since ‘Emotion’—‘Day and Night’ arrives together and marks the first double album of her career. The songs are split between day and night, with the Day tracks shining brighter and feeling calmer, and the Night tracks aiming straight for the dance floor. It’s not a particularly original concept, but the Canadian handles it with her habitual solidity, and if there’s a pop artist you can always trust, it’s Carly Rae Jepsen.
Let’s be clear from the outset: ‘Day and Night’ is indulgent (could any album with 24 tracks and nearly an hour and a half be anything else?), and it’s up to the listener whether to gulp it all down in one sitting or split it into two doses. Either way, there’s another piece of evidence: the product is top quality, crafted by the best professionals (Kyle Shearer, CJ Baran, Arthur Bresna and Cole MGN., as the main producers) and packaged with a perfect red bow.
‘Day’ offers a side of Jepsen that we’d glimpsed in hints on albums like ‘Dedicated’ or ‘The Loneliest Time’, but never explored with such detail. It’s a refined sound in which the artist allows herself to veer away from her usual euphoric pop to wander into psychedelic terrain, a chamber-pop feel where her voice blends with the instrumentation more than ever. ‘After All’ opens the album with a tambourine and piano notes joined by gorgeous string arrangements. The result is a declaration of intent for what lies in this first half: an energy that’s as enthusiastic as it is tranquil.
Carly is traversing one of the happiest moments of her life—she has just married Cole MGN and welcomed a child. It’s inevitable that all that fervor bleeds into most of the songs, and there are few people who can reflect that wave of love and optimism as she can. In ‘Habits of Creatures’ she wants her partner to give her “his nights and his days”; in ‘Versailles’, which offers a abrupt melodic shift in the chorus, she wants to be “good, bad, have fun, feel desperate”; while in the elegant and sexy ‘Soft’ she pleads for “soft kisses as if the sky.”
The Cupid’s spell also threads through the grand ‘On Wires’, one of the most interesting and satisfying experiments she has undertaken in her career, in which she pays homage to 70s psychedelia. Distorted guitars and her voice drenched in reverb convey that urgent desire reflected in the lyrics. Another nod to that decade is ‘Blue Skies’, where the singer’s vocal performance reaches new heights, rising as if attempting to touch the sky. And she completes it with the splendid ‘Burning Heart’, in which Carly wraps herself in a bed of guitars and string instruments and ends with an unexpected and magnificent saxophone solo. Yet not everything on ‘Day’ is rosy. The exception is ‘Something Tragic’, which depicts the aftermath of a breakup with persistent percussion and unsettling synths. It’s the most reflective moment of this part of the project and marks a necessary tonal shift.
On the other hand, ‘Night’ is dedicated to losing oneself in eighties synths, triumphant melodies and enormous choruses. The electronics burst from the first track, ‘Never Let a Good Thing Die’, which looks straight toward the club and pays homage to funk. In a similar vein, ‘Amalfi Coast’ offers a tense, danceable tapestry, full of layers and house textures. It’s a track with special meaning, since Carly found inspiration for the album’s visual and sonic concept during a vacation on the Amalfi Coast.
In ‘Don’t Leave Me On the Dancefloor’ she channels ABBA in one of those electropop numbers so characteristic of CRJ, with her voice leading over shimmering synthesizers. Perhaps less polished but equally effective is ‘Motivation’, a family ode whose lack of subtlety is offset by a highly addictive melody.
In ‘Near or Far’, Jepsen ventures into the realm of deep house for the first time with very satisfying results. The track remains something of a mystery that gradually pushes the listener toward the unknown. Lowering the BPM, the melodic mid-tempo of ‘That’s Just Me’ serves as that late-night drop during a party, recalling an ex.
In the final stretch, ‘No Labels I Love You’ is a house‑warming pop shot that could sit in any of the artist’s albums. Curiously, it was the first song she wrote for this record during the sessions for ‘The Loveliest Time’. More stimulating and odd is the closing piece ‘Super Sage’, one of the most original productions the Canadian has signed to date. It begins with a vocoder‑tinged vocal over claustrophobic synthesizers that gradually begin to clear. The song wanders through different sonic zones, with abrupt melodic shifts and bubbling sounds that appear and disappear until, in the last moments, it climaxes with the repetition of the line “I love you baby so much.” It’s a fitting ending for an album that constantly moves between opposing poles, the new and the familiar, day and night.
