Conan Gray surprised fans this morning by announcing that his fourth album, Wishbone, will be released on August 15th. The lead single, “This Song,” is set to drop next week.
Gray shared the news in a lengthy post, revealing that he had been slowly writing new music on his own, late after shows and between tours 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.”
He had kept the new tracks a secret for some time from his friends and his label, not sure if these were songs he would release. “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. 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.”
After playing the songs for frequent collaborator Daniel Nigro, Gray began to record 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.”
Gray added that every song was written by himself, in his pajamas, in his bed. Nigro, along with Ethan Gruska, Noah Conrad, Elvira Anderfjärd, and Luka Kloser, produced the album. The fantastical album cover depicts Gray dressed like a sailor floating on a pillow and holding a large wishbone of the album’s namesake.
“Here’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.”
Gray released his third LP Found Heaven last April. He subsequently went on tour that summer in support of the album. He’ll be playing Governors Ball in New York this June.
