Carly Rae Jepsen – Versailles

She watched a Sofia Coppola movie in Sweden, wrote a song about partying at Versailles the next day, and only visited the palace a week later.

Carly Rae Jepsen was in Sweden when she watched Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, the 2006 film that scored an eighteenth-century court with post-punk records. The next day she wrote Versailles with Noonie Bao. A week after that, she went to the palace itself for the first time, which means the song about wanting a night there was finished before she had seen the place.

Keep watching: Carly Rae Jepsen – Motivation · more Carly Rae Jepsen →

The song works the way Coppola’s film does, by treating a historical setting as a mood rather than a subject. Jepsen is not writing about the French court. She is writing about the pursuit of one perfect night out, and borrowing the palace as the image for it, right down to a line casting herself as a modern version of the queen. Elias Kapari, Markus Krunegård and Bao share the writing credit with her, and Kapari produced it.

It arrived on September 18, 2026, as the fifth single from Day and Night, Jepsen’s eighth studio album and her first album of new material since The Loveliest Time in 2023. The record is a double, 24 tracks split across two halves, and Versailles sits third on the Day side. On Wires, After All, Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor and Motivation preceded it.

A rollout built out of postcards

Jepsen has a history of strange, patient campaigns, and this one ran all summer. On June 1 her website played two different instrumental snippets, each for twelve hours, one of them the track that became After All. From June 11 she posted postcard images to her social accounts twice a day, each one captioned with a fragment of lyric, a location, and a time of day. The structure told you what the album was before the album existed: one set of songs for daylight, one for the dark.

The video, directed by Kanya Iwana and filmed in Los Angeles, keeps the same logic. There is no château. There is a party, and Jepsen moving through it imagining the place she is singing about, which is the honest version of the fantasy: the palace is never where you are, and the perfect night is always the one being described rather than the one happening.

She plays a sunset set at New York’s All Things Go Festival on September 27, her first live performance of the year. The album took three years to arrive and came out in one piece, twice the usual size, from a writer whose whole method is to chase a feeling until it turns into a song. This time she chased it to Versailles, and then, a week late, actually went.