Carly Rae Jepsen’s Day & Night; Love Around the Clock
POP TINGZ RATING
7.5/10
If there is one idea Carly Rae Jepsen has followed with almost religious devotion across nearly two decades, it is her belief in the pummelling power of love. Not simply romance, but the anticipation of it, the fantasy of it, the agony of wanting someone who may or may not want you back. Few pop writers have spent more time examining the seconds before the kiss, the night before the confession, or the possibility that this time, finally, it might work out.
Which makes Day & Night an unusually interesting record for her.
Since her last album, Jepsen married longtime producer and songwriting partner Cole M.G.N. and became a mother. Inevitably, that raises the question hanging over her eighth studio album: what does Carly Rae Jepsen write about once she has apparently found the stability she spent so many records chasing?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is still love.
Across a sprawling 24 tracks, Day & Night does not abandon Jepsen's favorite subject so much as widen its parameters. Love here can mean domestic contentment, nostalgia, sexual excitement, old wounds, family expectations, or simply the pleasure of feeling good in someone's presence. If earlier Jepsen records often treated romance as an impossible destination, this one is more interested in what happens once you arrive and discover that desire does not magically disappear.
The album divides itself neatly in half. Day is supposed to be the lighter side: bright piano, breezy guitars, soft synths, poolside arrangements and songs that practically arrive wearing sunglasses on a sunny day. Night takes over with house, disco, deeper basslines and dancefloor production. It is not exactly a subtle concept. At times the distinction is so literal that you can almost imagine the streaming playlist descriptions writing themselves. But Jepsen has never needed a complicated thesis to make compelling pop.
And Day has plenty of it.
"After All" is one of the album's immediate highlights, built around staccato piano, tambourine and an almost absurd amount of optimism. "I want to be the owner / I want to give you flowers," she sings as the song gradually opens into a choir repeating its chorus. It sounds like summer without resorting to the usual pop shorthand for summer. The brightness feels lived in rather than manufactured.
That sense of contentment keeps surfacing throughout the first half. "Blue Skies" is almost comically straightforward in its metaphor, but Jepsen has always been able to sell emotional simplicity by committing completely to it. "Burning Heart" glides on shimmering guitar and light synths like a warm breeze, while "Wild Child" strips things back with acoustic guitar and a slight folk-pop influence as she asks a lover for patience. None of these songs reinvent her language, but they show how naturally she inhabits it.
More interesting are the moments when the music begins pushing against the simplicity of the concept. "Versailles" toys with tempo, strings and flashes of house music, speeding up and slowing down as if the song cannot decide whether it wants to lounge or dance. That instability suits Jepsen, whose music is often at its best when romantic certainty runs headfirst into physical excitement. "On Wires" achieves something similar through restraint, beginning with piano before live drums quietly slip into the second verse. Her repeated "I want you" lands with surprising force, largely because Jepsen allows herself to actually belt it instead of burying the desire beneath layers of production.
That vocal openness is important because Day & Night is not really a reinvention of Jepsen so much as an expansion of the spaces she feels comfortable occupying. "Soft" drifts into lush chillwave territory, while "Just a Little Walk on the Moon" leans into a slightly kitschy bossa nova arrangement that borders on upscale hotel-lobby music. Somehow, it works. Jepsen has always heard pop at a slightly different angle from everyone else. She can make something uncool charming simply by refusing to wink at it.
By the time Night arrives, the album's pulse noticeably changes. Jepsen has flirted with house music before, but she leans into it more aggressively here than on any previous project. "Never Let a Good Thing Die" introduces the shift with a groovy bassline, disco flourishes and sample-heavy production before "Amalfi Coast" pushes further into light house, all whirling synths and buzzing movement, one of the album’s highlights.
"Patience Power Passion" sounds almost designed for a Kylie Minogue comparison, sleek and aerodynamic, while "Don't Leave Me on the Dancefloor" finds Jepsen channeling ABBA melodically without slipping into imitation. There is a pleasure in hearing her work with arrangements this physical. Jepsen's songs have always been emotionally kinetic, even when their production was not. Here, the music finally starts matching the restlessness of the writing.
The strongest stretch comes when the nightclub becomes something more complicated than escape. "Motivation" uses unmistakably '90s house language to examine how family always sticks together, allowing a dance track to carry more emotional baggage than its surface initially suggests. "Near or Far" sinks deeper into house production, proving Jepsen can sound perfectly comfortable over heavier club rhythms without losing the melodic instincts that have always separated her from more anonymous dance-pop.
Then there is "Super Sage," which sends the album somewhere stranger for its finale. Dreamy whispers and glitching synths drift through a psychedelic-pop cosmos before the tempo begins gathering momentum. It is less tidy than much of what precedes it and considerably more interesting for that reason. On an album that sometimes explains itself too clearly, "Super Sage" lets atmosphere do the work.
That tension between immaculate production and less consistent writing runs throughout Day & Night.
Jepsen's songwriting has never required literary complexity. Her gift has always been turning uncomplicated emotions into devastatingly specific pop moments. At her best, she can take something as basic as wanting somebody and make it feel like nobody has ever wanted anybody before. There are several instances of that magic here, but across 24 tracks, the writing inevitably thins out. Some songs feel constructed around a feeling rather than an observation, relying on the production to supply the personality.
Fortunately, the production is very good.
Cole M.G.N., who co-wrote and produced several tracks, understands Jepsen's instincts intimately, and Kyle Shearer likewise gives the album a polished but flexible sonic identity. Pianos can become house beats, guitars can dissolve into synths, and seemingly lightweight pop arrangements often reveal clever rhythmic details after a few listens. Even when the lyrics are merely serviceable, the songs tend to remain pleasurable.
That is both the album's strength and its limitation.
At 24 tracks, Day & Night is simply a lot of Carly Rae Jepsen. For longtime, devoted listeners, that excess may be part of the appeal. Jepsen has cultivated a career partly through abundance, releasing B-sides collections strong enough to embarrass other artists' main albums. There has always been something charming about her apparent inability to throw away a good pop song.
But Day & Night could use a little more ruthlessness.
The day/night concept is enjoyable without being particularly profound, and a tighter edit might have transformed the album into something more mature. By the final stretch of each half, several songs begin competing for the same emotional and sonic real estate. A 16-track version of this record could have been genuinely formidable. At 24, it sometimes feels as if Jepsen has invited everyone she knows to the party because she cannot bear to leave anyone outside.
Then again, that impulse feels quintessentially Carly.
She has spent nearly 20 years making pop music about opening yourself completely to feeling, even when doing so makes you look foolish. Day & Night extends that generosity to the album itself. There is too much of it, some of the writing could use another pass, and its central concept occasionally announces itself with all the subtlety of a neon sign.
Yet the pleasure rarely disappears.
Jepsen may have found the domestic stability her earlier music spent years romanticizing, but contentment has not dulled her curiosity. If anything, Day & Night sounds like an artist discovering that falling in love was never the end of the story. There are mornings after, late nights, old scars, new desires, and dance floors still waiting.
Day & Night may not be the defining statement of her career, but it does something perhaps more revealing: it proves that even after finding what she was looking for, Carly Rae Jepsen still sees love a little differently from everyone else.
