It's been a year-and-a-half since Carly Rae Jepsen put out a single, and two-and-a-half years since she put out a proper full-length album. Super fans of the Canadian pop star have been counting down the days, weeks and months to her next release and this week, that time finally arrived.
Yesterday, on Halloween, Jepsen gave fans the best treat of all: an announcement of a new single coming out this week. Today, she has revealed "Party For One," our first taste of the singer's upcoming new album, slated to come out in 2019.
The track, a joyous synth-pop self-love anthem, is accompanied by a music video that finds Jepsen and a number of other hotel patrons dancing, crying, drinking and bathing on their own. "If you don't care about me," Jepsen warns, "I'll just dance for myself." While the act of doing anything on your own can sound scary or lonely, Jepsen's new track puts a positive spin on things — much like other self-love anthems like Nicki Minaj's "Feeling Myself," Charli XCX's "Body of my Own" and Hailee Steinfeld's "Love Myself."
In a press release, Jepsen says the song is "an anthem of what it is to celebrate time with yourself, which is a hard thing for people to really enjoy sometimes, and it's something I'm learning to do more and more. This song represents a lot of what this album is about for me which is romantic love but self-love too."
2018 has been a relatively quiet period for Jepsen, who last released "Cut to the Feeling," one of CBC Music's best songs of 2017. Since then, she hasn't released a song of her own but has jumped on collaborations with Charli XCX, Danny L. Harle and BC Unidos. She also narrated an episode of Vox's Netflix series, Explained, about the science behind music.
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