Kelsea Ballerini’s next studio album, Patterns, will be released in the fall.
“Let’s start unpacking,” Ballerini, 30, wrote via Instagram on Thursday, August 8, sharing a photo of the LP cover art.
The record’s lead image features Ballerini lounging atop of a pile of mismatched suitcases on a beach at sunset. The country singer stunned in a nude gown and wore her signature blonde locks in beachy waves.
In her Instagram announcement, Ballerini confirmed that Patterns’ lead single will be “Sorry, Mom,” which comes out at midnight on Friday, August 9.
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Patterns will be Ballerini’s fifth full-length album, telling the Associated Press on Thursday that it offers an “accurate snapshot” of her life.
“I think that people probably expect this really happy-go-lucky, love, mushy, gushy record from me. That’s not the case,” she told the AP in a Thursday interview. “And I’m really proud of that. It would have been easy to, I think, just collect the really beautiful parts of my life that I’ve dusted off and found the last couple of years. But that’s not the fullness of my experience.”
Ballerini split from ex-husband Morgan Evans in 2022, which served as the inspiration for her 2023 EP, Rolling Up the Welcome Mat.
“When I put out [Rolling Up the Welcome Mat], I did it relatively quietly. Everything about the way that the music has connected [with people] has been really unexpected,” Ballerini exclusively told Us Weekly in August 2023. “I just got to a place where the songs and what they were about — obviously, that will always be a chapter of my life that I will bookmark with that album — but I don’t have those feelings toward it anymore.”
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Several months later, Ballerini released a second version of Rolling Up the Welcome Mat that moved the needle on her breakup grief. The For Good EP ended with a track called “How Do I Do This?” about Ballerini’s first date with actor Chase Stokes, whom she’s been dating since last January.
Patterns, she told the AP, will not be full of sweet songs about her relationship with Stokes, 31.
“There’s a lot of narrative of learning how to go from fighting with something or with someone to fighting for something or for someone. And there’s a lot of that journey for the whole record,” Ballerini told the outlet. “The heartbeat [of the album is about] analyzing yourself and the people that you love the most in order to grow.”
Debut single “Sorry, Mom,” however, is a love song.
“The first line is, ‘Sorry, mom, I smelled like cigarettes.’ You know, it’s the things that your mom doesn’t really want to hear,” Ballerini told the AP. “But then you get to the chorus and the meat of it and the heart of it, and it’s a letter of thanks to my mom for raising me the way she did.”
Patterns drops on Friday, October 25.
