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Kelsea Ballerini revealed long-awaited details about her next album on Thursday morning (August 8).
Ballerini’s fifth full-length studio album, Patterns, will arrive on October 25. The East Tennessee-born singer-songwriter announced the album title and release date as she posted the album artwork on Instagram. One of the tracks, “Sorry Mom,” will arrive at midnight, Ballerini confirmed in her announcement after sharing a sneak peek of the unreleased ballad on TikTok. She teased at the end of her announcement on Instagram: “let’s start unpacking…”
Patterns is Ballerini’s highly-anticipated follow-up to her most recent full-length album, Subject To Change, which released in September 2022. Ballerini quickly followed that project with a surprise EP and accompanying short film, Rolling Up The Welcome Mat, sharing her story of heartache and journey to heal after divorce. The 6-track EP later expended to Rolling Up The Welcome Mat (For Good), accounting for a few fan-favorite lyric swaps, an extended version of “Interlude” and an additional seventh track about dating again after divorce.
Now, however, Ballerini is turning the page to a chapter that offers a different perspective of romantic relationships.
“I think that people probably expect this really happy-go-lucky, love, mushy, gushy record from me. That’s not the case,” Ballerini said of Patterns in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “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.”
“The reality is, I’ve been singing about a chapter of my life that is far past me now,” Ballerini said on the Grand Ole Opry stage in November 2023, referring to the songs that appear on Rolling Up The Welcome Mat. “And I’m writing about the chapter of life that I’m in, and it looks very different, and I kind of wanted to share a bit of it now. I’m very gently and slowly starting to make the next record. I really want to take the time to handle it with care.”
During that Opry performance, Ballerini surprised the audience with songwriters Karen Fairchild and Hillary Lindsey to deliver the debut live performance of “To The Men That Love Women After Heartbreak.” The heartfelt ballad arrived amid Ballerini’s new relationship with Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes. The couple first sparked dating rumors when Ballerini appeared in a photo that Stokes shared on Instagram in January 2023. She confirmed the relationship in an interview the following month, and revealed they started talking after she slid into his DMs in December 2022 (she’s since shared the screenshots). Ballerini and Stokes celebrated their one-year anniversary earlier this year. Ballerini said in a previous interview with Flaunt Magazine earlier this year that hopes her new music can reflect “what it feels like to be falling in love and feeling a new level of safety.”
Ballerini’s mom, Carla, also said there are “some incredible love songs” on her daughter’s upcoming album. Carla hosted a Q&A with her daughter during an intimate rooftop performance in June in Downtown Nashville, Tennessee (Ballerini noted a full-circle moment as she performed “Penthouse” from Rolling Up The Welcome Mat, pointing out that she could see the penthouse referenced in the song from the rooftop where she performed that day). Ballerini, who reminisced on the song she wrote for her mom on Mother's Day in her childhood, described her new album as “grounded,” and said she’s “never handled anything with so much care in my life.”
Ballerini teased additional details about Patterns in recent weeks, including hinting on TikTok that the title of her next song to release is “something that I have worked into every interview, every conversation, every Instagram ‘ask me anything’ for a while now.” “Sorry Mom” will follow “Cowboys Cry Too,” Ballerini’s recently-released duet with Noah Kahan. Before that, she marked the 10-year release of one of her first-ever singles, “Love Me Like You Mean It,” with a reimagined version.
Before officially announcing Patterns, Ballerini said in a teaser: “What’s a pattern? It’s like a reoccurring sequence of the first thing you reach for because it’s closest. It’s the first thought you think, or first feeling you feel, or first response you say. (It’s the) first choice you make. It’s like your second nature because it’s what you’ve done over and over and over again. And maybe it’s familial or generational. It’s been handed down. It’s in our blood, or maybe it’s learned and developed from adapting to life. And maybe some of our patterns are just our own damn fault. I think we have the ability to look at our patterns and find the ones that serve us, and then we look at the ones that we don’t want to carry with us and we don’t want to hand down to future us, and you change them. I think that we make patterns so they don’t make us.”