Carly Rae Jepsen sets her Versailles video at a party in Los Angeles

Carly Rae Jepsen released a video for Versailles on 18 September, the same day the album it comes from arrived. Kanya Iwana directed it and it was shot in Los Angeles, where Jepsen spends the clip dancing at a party while imagining herself somewhere considerably grander.

The song's starting point was a film. Rolling Stone reports that Versailles took its cue from Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, and the lyric does not hide it: Jepsen sings about wanting to see the palace at night, about losing her head, about being "Marie Antoinette but modern". She wrote the track with Elias Kapari, Noonie Bao and Markus Krunegard, and Kapari produced it.

The album around it is unusually large. Day and Night is a double LP of 24 songs, split into two twelve-track halves that answer to the title, and it is her first record of new material since The Loveliest Time in 2023. Releasing a video on release day for a song buried inside a 24-track set is a way of giving one half of it a face.

The rollout that got there was patient and a little strange. Jepsen began seeding the album in June: on the first of the month her official website played two different instrumentals, one of them the track After All, for twelve hours each. From 11 June she started posting postcard-style images to her social accounts twice a day, each captioned with a lyric, a location and a timestamp. Day and night, in other words, worked as a release mechanic before it worked as a title.

Versailles is not the first song from the record to get a video. Don't Leave Me on the Dance Floor, which Rolling Stone describes as ABBA-inspired, had already been released with one of its own.

Jepsen plays her first live show of the year on 27 September, a sunset set at the All Things Go festival in New York. Away from her own records, her stage musical of 10 Things I Hate About You with Lena Dunham has been in the works for some time and now has a Broadway date. New releases are tracked on the release calendar, and the rest of our pop coverage sits on the pop hub.