Is Day and Night Too Much Carly Rae Jepsen?
Last Friday, September 18, Carly Rae Jepsen released Day and Night, and the first thing anyone says about it is the number. Twenty-four songs, 85 minutes, two discs of twelve. The second thing is the score: 83 on Metacritic from ten critics, the highest of her career.
The third thing, the one worth arguing about, is whether it should exist at this size. Pitchfork's Marissa Lorusso thinks a condensed release would have carried the concept better. Slant Magazine called it her most sonically adventurous album and also a bit unwieldy. In The Times, Will Hodgkinson felt the length worked against it.
We think they have it backwards. For a decade, Jepsen's riskiest and often best songs lived on the albums that came after the album. Day and Night is the first time she put them in the main event, and the length is the price of that. It is worth paying. You just need a route in, and we have one.
Why the Side B habit matters
Some history first, because it explains the shape of this record. Emotion came out in the summer of 2015, debuted at number 16 on the Billboard 200 with modest sales, and then became a cult hit by word of mouth. The next summer, on August 26, 2016, she answered fans who wanted more with Emotion: Side B, eight songs cut from the album. Pitchfork heard it as a continuation of the album rather than a typical collection of B-sides.
She did it again. Dedicated came out in May 2019; Dedicated Side B followed on May 21, 2020, built from the same sessions. After The Loneliest Time in October 2022 came The Loveliest Time in July 2023, a companion drawn from the more than 65 B-sides left over from those sessions, a pile she told her label she "could make something of."
Fans learned to wait for the second record, and so did she. "Sometimes in the past, it would feel like the B-sides [project] was my personal favourite," she told NME in June.
Upstairs and downstairs
She told NME in June that the split came out of a real problem: a hefty pile of songs that did not fit together. The Day songs are "more organic in nature, with more live instruments and a little hint of my roots in folk music." The Night songs went "darker, more experimental, synth-based." Her friend and collaborator Tavish Crowe gave her the image that unlocked it: a house party with an upstairs and a downstairs.
That is how it plays. Day leans on 1970s-flavored psychedelic pop and live playing. Night is sleek synth dance-pop. She told NME she walked into one session fresh from seeing ABBA Voyage in London, wanting to do "our version of ABBA, but with synths," and NME's review hears exactly that in "Don't Leave Me on the Dance Floor." The through-line is personal. Much of the record is about falling in love with the musician-producer Cole M.G.N., whom she married in October 2025 and co-wrote songs with. "There's nothing wilder than writing a love song about your husband, then showing it to him, and having him participate in it!" she told NME.
The critics who liked it liked the risk. AllMusic's Heather Phares gave it 4.5 stars and credited the length with letting her take chances she used to save for the companion releases. In Paste, Dash Lewis called it her "strangest, most musically voracious work to date" and wrote that everything sounds placed "into the stereo field with tweezers." NME's Nick Levine called the double album "both a grower and a shower," and Rolling Stone's headline went with "A Disquisition on Love."
Even the fans of the record concede a soft spot or two. Lewis admits it "can be a slightly patchy listen" and singles out the stuttering "Versailles," early on the Day disc, as out of place.
The ten-song album hiding inside
Pitchfork is right about one thing: there is a tighter album in here. The fix is to find it yourself. Start with these ten, five from each disc, in this order, and you have a short record that works on its own.
From the Day disc:
- "After All", the opener and second single, a seaside-retreat song about thinking ahead.
- "On Wires", the lead single, which she said was her way of telling people to expect the unexpected.
- "Burning Heart", the start of what Paste calls "the glorious run" on Day, which Paste hears as War on Drugs-esque.
- "Wild Child", a campfire ballad.
- "Soft", where that run ends in "swelling psychedelia."
From the Night disc:
- "Amalfi Coast", sun-dappled disco.
- "Don't Leave Me on the Dance Floor", the ABBA-with-synths single.
- "Motivation", the house-flavored fourth single.
- "No Labels, I Love You", which Paste calls a "beachy house heater" and the first song she and Cole M.G.N. made together.
- "Near or Far", elegantly melancholy, and the right way to close the night.
Then go back and play both discs straight through. Once the ten have landed, the other fourteen, including the dreamy but thin "Good Fine Alright," stop feeling like padding and start sounding like the rooms you skipped at the party. "Just a Little Walk on the Moon", a bossa nova detour that closes Day, is exactly the kind of song that used to end up on a Side B.
Where to go next in her catalog
If Day and Night is your way in, the ranking below is the order we would take the rest. Emotion is the peak and the reason she has a devoted following at all. Dedicated is the most consistent dance record. The Loneliest Time is the weird, warm one, and its companion shows how much she leaves on the cutting-room floor. Kiss, from 2012, is where the wider world first met her, with Max Martin among its producers and guest vocals from Justin Bieber and Owl City.
