Conan Gray has announced his fourth album, ‘Wishbone’. Find all the details below.
The record will serve as the follow-up to 2024’s ‘Found Heaven‘, and is due for release on August 15. You can pre-order/pre-save it here. ‘Wishbone”s lead single, ‘This Song’, is set to drop this Friday (May 30).
Sharing the news on Instagram, Gray revealed that he’d been writing the music between tours and late at night after shows over the past two years. “I’d come back home and write all the things I felt nobody wanted to hear,” he explained, “maybe even the things i didn’t want people to hear.”
The singer said that initially, he kept the songs secret from his friends and label, thinking he may not release them at all. “But over time, I began to feel something I’d never felt before,” he wrote. “I started to need the music. I listened in airports, in long cab trips, blaring in the shower. In heartbreak, then in joy.
“I started to play it for my friends, and they started to need it too,” he continued. “In car ride requests with the windows down, in a split pair of wired headphones on the subway home. It became an egregiously niche soundtrack to our own lives in real time, singing just for us.”
He then played the songs to frequent collaborator Daniel Nigro, and they subsequently began work on the album. “It felt like the music was reminding me who I am, at an experimental time in my twenties where ‘who I am’ had no definition at all,” he continued. “My driftwood childhood in texas. My lucid summers in London. My blue striped bed sheets in my college apartment.”
Every track was written by Gray, in his pyjamas, in his bed, and was produced by Nigro, along with Ethan Gruska, Noah Conrad, Elvira Anderfjärd, and Luka Kloser.
“There’s so much left to say, but I’ll say it in the music,” he wrote. In a postscript to the message, he added that “a wishbone never breaks even.”
He’s already shared a cinematic teaser clip to ‘This Song’, which shows him driving through country roads as strings play. See it above.
NME gave Gray’s 80s-inspired ‘Found Heaven’ three stars, in a review that read: “On prior albums, romance existed as a mythical object always slightly out of his reach, yet here he speaks from the other side, having been moulded by it forever. “I aint sorry/I wouldn’t change a thing”, he sings on ‘Forever With Me’, finding joy within heartbreak and strength in the revelation of how much he can truly feel.
“So maybe as an album it carries all the nuance of a Best Of The Decade compilation, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun. After all, it’s the ‘best of’ for a reason.”
Speaking to NME ahead of the album’s release, Gray told us about how spending time in the UK had shaped his songwriting process. “London informed the album a lot. I wrote a lot of the songs about London and about my time here in London,” he explained. “I think that British pop, and especially British pop from the 80s and the 70s, was a huge influence on this album. I spent so much time here that it was just going to leak into the music… I’m singing in a fully British accent in some of the songs, because I think it’s funny.
“It makes me smile. There’s no other reason. I think also there’s a mentality here, that British people actually don’t take themselves too seriously, and I like that. It reminds me of home. I’m a very sarcastic person and a very crass person and I think the album is pretty sarcastic and pretty crass. I’m having fun. I’m just joking around.”
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