New Music Reviews: Carly Rae Jepsen and Julia Holter

Do you like your female solo artists perky and poppy? Or moody and improvisational?

Carly Ray Jepsen

Day and Night (Continued)

2026, 9/10
Carly Rae Jepsen’s landmark 2015 album Emotion isn’t about relationships. Instead, it’s about the liminal spaces between relationships – the giddy crush of ‘Run Away With Me’ and the anguished, lingering, post-breakup feeling of ‘Fever’ (from Side B). But a decade later, she’s married and singing about love on the double album Day and Night.

The two discs have different identities. The first disc is retro and more band-based, while the second centres on late-night dance music. You might not expect a hefty, thematic double album from Jepsen, but it works brilliantly. It gives her space to stretch out and explore different areas. It’s not perfect, but like many great double albums, you’ll notice different highlights each time you listen.

It takes a couple of tracks to get going, but when the memorable chorus of ‘Versailles’ hits, you know you’re in the hands of a great pop artist. The next track is even better, ‘On Wires’ with a brooding verse and huge euphoric chorus.

The first disc is my favourite, more eclectic. The most unexpected twist is the nasty ‘Something Tragic’, Jepsen exposing past trauma with lines like “I’m still in love with you or parts of you, it’s complicated/Then I remember everything you did to me, I fucking hate you”. She also ventures close to Dark Side of the Moon-era Floyd with the atmospheric pedal steel on ‘Lullaby’. But my favourite deep cut is ‘Burning Heart’, both jangly and sophisticated, with a great chord vamp in the last line of the chorus.

On the second disc, Jepsen ventures into the club. The single ‘Don’t Leave Me On The Dancefloor’ features the same blend of euphoria and heartache as the best ABBA tracks.

But she’s often delivering smooth, sophisticated house tracks like ‘You Don’t Know How It Feels’ and ‘Diver’.

A month after release, Jepsen added an extra eight tracks, naming the new edition Day and Night (Continued). She made good decisions about which tracks to demote, but ‘Love Depressed’ has already become a fan favourite. “We make love depressed when I think about it/I don’t think about it.”

Carly Rae Jepsen has been delivering high-class pop music for more than a decade and deserves mainstream adoration rather than just a rabid cult.

Julia Holter

Materia

2026, 7/10
Julia Holter didn’t plan to make her seventh album so quickly, but Materia grew organically. She felt that ‘Materia’, a song from her previous album, had unexplored possibilities, so she made two new versions. She quickly developed other songs from earlier demos or from new ideas, ready for her band to play on their 2024 tour. Working with the same cast of musicians, like fretless bass player Devra Hoff and drummer Elizabeth Goodfellow, Materia feels like a companion piece to 2024’s Something in the Room She Moves.

The reason I wanted to expand “Materia” is because it has, no pun intended, a lot of material in it that is fun to work with. There’s like this Hildegard von Bingen-inspired melody that has a lot of leaps, and then there’s like this jazzy chords under it, and there was a lot to do with both the harmony and the melody in that song. It felt like there’s more material than my other songs to work with, and the version of “Materia” that’s on Something in the Room She Moves is quite sparse, and I just thought, it would be fun to do this with a band.
Julia Holter, The Fader

Like Something in the Way She Moves, it’s less dynamic and exciting than her best work. The most enjoyable material is the offbeat pop songs near the start of the record. ‘Fantasy’ has an insistent riff, while Hoff’s bass squiggles sound great on ‘My Lost One’. The opener ‘The Laugh is in the Eyes’ is the easiest entry point into a dense record.

If you like Holter’s earlier work, you’ll enjoy this too, but it’s a step below her best.