Teddy Swims dates the album Ugly for January and shares Perfect Man

Teddy Swims has put a date on Ugly, his next album, and released a song from it. The record arrives on 22 January 2027 through Warner Records, and Perfect Man is the first piece of it, released with a live performance video.

The album came out of a specific stretch of his life rather than a writing camp. Jambase reports he wrote it across the 15 months since his son was born, which explains why the lead song is about the gap between what a person expects of himself and what he can actually manage.

Swims put that plainly. "Perfect Man is a song about self forgiveness," he said, describing a standard he has held himself to that he calls completely unrealistic, and saying he has been too hard on himself as a partner and as a father.

The argument he makes from there is the part worth quoting. He says he believes insecurities and quirks are signs of strength rather than weakness, and that he hopes the song opens a conversation about them instead of encouraging people to hide them. "The beauty of chasing perfection is knowing we will never reach it," he added.

The song's construction matches that scale. An eight-piece string and horn section plays on it, and the writing credits run long: Julian Bunetta, Afterhrs, Matt Zara, Mikky Ekko, Kendrick Nicholls, Alex Izquierdo and Edgar Barrera all worked on it alongside Swims.

The touring runs ahead of the album rather than behind it. Ugly Tour 2026 is a North American arena run that opens on 22 September in Kansas City and continues through November, which means the songs will be on stage for four months before the record they belong to arrives.

That sequencing is deliberate and increasingly common at this level: a tour named after an unreleased album builds the title into an audience's vocabulary before release week does. The album is tracked on the release calendar and the dates on the tour guide, alongside the rest of the rnb-soul calendar. Warner's Nashville operation has been reorganising separately, covered in its marketing team changes.