Baby Rose has a theory about how songs should happen: late, and in one take. Nine of the 12 songs on her new album, Yearnalism, were finished in the last 30 minutes to an hour of a session, the singer told Rolling Stone, and she's now carrying that urgency into arenas as the opener on Olivia Dean's tour.
Yearnalism, her third project and a Secretly Canadian release that arrived July 10, per Apple Music, mixes pop, soft rock and country-tinged soul around a thesis about love's contradictions. Rolling Stone points to the single “Friends Again” with Leon Thomas, whom she worked with on Mutt, and “Is This Love” with Elmiene. Its title came from a meme about “majoring in yearnalism.”
Nine out of the 12 songs on this record were all done in the last 30 minutes to an hour of a session.
Baby Rose, to Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone
The first sessions, in London last June with producer Miles C. James, didn't go as she planned. James asked who she was before they made anything, and the two wrote intentions on a whiteboard, from God and the state of the world to her mother's new house. Their first session wasn't recorded at all, which she says was “very hard for me to unlearn.” It was one of those last-half-hour songs, “Sunday,” that came out of it, a near-five-minute ballad inspired by a sunroom in her mother's home.
Later, she and her crew spent nearly two weeks at 64 Sound in Los Angeles, working Nashville-style from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. “The studio was like an ideal grandpa’s basement,” she said, with the whole group eating together at night. Vince Staples dropped by a couple of times while he was working on his own album, she recalled.
From 250-cap rooms to arenas
The Olivia Dean call came mid-album, while she was making “Better,” the song Rolling Stone says gets closest to the thesis of the project.
I was ecstatic, like crying.
Baby Rose, on being asked to open for Olivia Dean, Rolling Stone
Her mother, who is also her manager, had always said she would play arenas. Rose used to bristle at that. “I used to get mad at my mom, because she was saying this while I was performing at 250- to 500-cap venues. It was too much pressure,” she said. She was recording with producer Alissia Benveniste that day and asked for the same scale: “Think arenas, think huge arenas!”
Why it matters
At 31, Rose is an artist whose rise has been slow and then, suddenly, wide. Her 2023 debut To Myself was rebuilt from a backup drive after an ex hacked her accounts and deleted her music, Rolling Stone recalls. Since then she has gone from sneaking into J. Cole's Dreamville camp to the Dean tour. The soft-spoken record she made along the way is part of our July guide to new music, alongside Steve Lacy, Gracie Abrams and Syd.
What's next is the road: more arena dates with Dean, and a mother who said so first. Rose's own takeaway is less about scale and more about release: “I don’t have to hold the world.” Another rising name on the road this summer: Elena Rose, opening for Karol G.
- Album
- Yearnalism (Secretly Canadian), July 10, 2026
- Collaborators
- Leon Thomas, Elmiene, Miles C. James
- Studio
- 64 Sound, Los Angeles
- On tour with
- Olivia Dean (opener)
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.
