She’s back! Kelly Clarkson announced the the album she’s been working on since her 2020 split from Brandon Blackstock will finally drop soon.
“It is officially time to tell you that I’ve been working on this project for for close to three years now. I wasn’t sure I was going to release it, but I am,” the songstress, 40, revealed in a video via Twitter and Instagram on Sunday, March 26.
The Kelly Clarkson Show host, whose last entirely original album dropped in 2017, revealed that her new LP is called Chemistry.
New music soon
pic.twitter.com/c9mPNchiE2
— Kelly Clarkson
“It’s called Chemistry because I was trying to find a word — also, it might be one of the songs on the album — that really described the whole thing,” Clarkson explained. “I didn’t want everybody to think I was just coming out with some ‘I’m angry,’ ‘I’m sad’ — just one or two emotions. This album is definitely the arc of an entire relationship. A whole relationship shouldn’t be brought down to just one thing. So there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly kinda thing going on in it.”
The Texas native added that she also appreciated the double-edged sword nature of that intense spark in a relationship. “Chemistry can be a really amazing, sexy, cool, fun thing, but it can also be very bad for you. So that’s why I named it Chemistry. I thought it was the perfect title to describe the entire album.”
She didn’t reveal a release date, but Clarkson promised that new music was on the way. “When I say soon, I mean really soon,” she added.
The singer concluded: “I’m so happy. I’m nervous, but I’m excited about putting it out.”
Clarkson and Blackstock, 46, called it quits in June 2020 after nearly seven years of marriage. The “Since U Been Gone” singer filed for divorce at the time, citing “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for the split.
The Voice coach and her estranged husband — who share daughter River Rose, 8, and son Remington, 6 — had a messy split amid the legal proceedings, which included a lengthy battle over a Montana property. Clarkson was legally declared single in September 2021, and their divorce was finalized six months later.
The daytime TV personality revealed in September 2022 that she’d recorded much of her next album when she was newly single but held off on releasing it until she processed her emotions.
“When my ex and I first separated, there were many emotions. It was hard. My producer and I were laughing yesterday because I was like, ‘Remember that time we wrote, like, 25 songs in a week?’ A lot of those are the ones that are on the album,” Clarkson told Variety at the time. “I literally wrote most of these almost two years ago. Then I told my label, ‘I can’t talk about this until I’ve gone through it,’ and it’s just taken some time to do that. That’s one of the reasons we’ve done a lot of Christmas stuff the past two years — because I was like, ‘Well, that’s happy!’”
She added that her new album is an emotional one — so personal that she considered not releasing it. “I hadn’t really been working hardcore on an album until I needed to. … But then the whole divorce thing happened, and I needed to write it,” Clarkson said at the the time. “And then I didn’t know if I was going to release it, because you can be very angry in that state of mind. So some of the songs, they definitely cover the gamut of emotions; there’s everything on the album. It’s almost like the arc of a relationship, because the beginning is so beautiful and so sweet, and then it evolves. And sometimes it doesn’t evolve how you want.”
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Clarkson’s Chemistry doesn’t yet have a release date.