Introducing the sophomore album from folk songstress Clara Mann, Wishbone, out via The state51 Conspiracy on 23 October 2026

Wishbone is available to pre-order on black vinyl, with transparent printed inners



Towards the end of Leos Carax's 1991 film ‘Les Amants du Pont-Neuf’ (‘The Lovers on the Bridge’), its drifting protagonists, a struggling artist and a half-blind painter, careen down the Seine as the city explodes with fireworks, the destitute lovers briefly possessing all of Paris. “It got to me more than anything I’ve watched in years,” says Clara Mann, who watched it on a small laptop screen in the middle of making her second album, Wishbone. Carax’s vision of love was a construction where worlds could be rebuilt and seen from the position of two – physical exaltations pitched against despair, light against dark, beauty and ruin struck from the same flint – a vision the South London songwriter couldn’t shake. Where Mann’s 2025 debut album Rift sat in a single strange, isolated shade of blue, Wishbone is built instead on contrast: a record with a kind of luminosity running through it, the brightest passages made legible by shadow.

From the very beginning of Wishbone, Mann found herself attempting something that had never come naturally to her. After the nostalgic introspection of Rift, she was determined to imagine good things for herself, and believe they might actually be within reach. It was, she says, a frightening decision – to picture a life that’s beautiful and allow herself to want it. Mann likens the wishbone image that gives the record its name to Marina Abramović's ‘Rest Energy’, the performance in which artist and partner hold a drawn bow and arrow between their bodies – a single gesture living in total trust and the possibility of ruin. It’s an emblem of love, but also of the larger wager the album keeps making; wanting good things, and letting other people want them for you, is worth the risk of the break. It’s a concept that’s never only romantic in Mann’s world – it stands for the whole precarious business of being held by anyone at all.

Perhaps as a result of this intention, Mann’s voice has never sounded more assured than on these songs: a clear and distinct instrument that’s both guiding and guided, raw and guttural when needed, the pied piper to her own balladic intonations when not. "Fortuna" was the first song written for the new album – a bridge between here and Rift – with its devastating opening couplet coming to terms with the distance to her old life: “Now that I only see colours, / I’ll forget your shape, / Blue is all I can remember, / Washed across your face.” And yet it’s shot through with joy, its loose, distant percussion drifting like a heartbeat heard through skin. Written after missing the last train home, riding two night buses through London in the early-December Christmas lights, it’s a lonely song but locked into the most vivid, magical moments of solitude. There’s a deliberate off-centredness to it that ends up feeling perfectly centred, recalling the meandering cadence of Jolie Holland.

“I felt very bare writing a lot of this album,” admits Mann. “I wasn’t interested in hiding behind the songs anymore, or being elusive or oblique. Throughout the record, there’s this sense of wanting to be witnessed, and recognised - and in order for those things to happen, you yourself have to be fully present, and willing to be seen. I wanted to live, and to write, from that feeling."

Ultimately, that sense of presence is also what most clearly separates this record from the last. In Rift, we heard Mann still full of open questions; Wishbone has little of that backward pull. Now in her mid-20s, she writes from conviction more than question, feeling more than place. She leans deliberately into the songwriting tradition, reaching for the rough-edged, performance-driven spirit of artists like Fiona Apple and Tom Waits while keeping faith with an older lineage of plainspoken English balladry. She has the folk singer's instinct for letting air move through a song, for trusting a melody to carry meaning without ornament, but the songs across Wishbone resist the costume-drama pieties of revivalism. The ballad here is a living form; a way of telling the truth at a slight angle.

Produced by 4AD resident Fabian Prynn, the two of them built the album’s world together from Mann’s demos and voice notes across a handful of intense, sometimes 14-hour long days at Norfolk’s Bam Bam Studios. “I was so not used to hearing my music expanded like this,” laughs Mann, recalling the first time she heard Prynn’s drums across the tracks. “The purest expression of a lot of this music, as I had experienced it, had always been me alone in a big hall.” But allowing in players she barely knew for the first time – Prynn joined by guitarist Kit Mosely, double bass player Marianne Schofield, alongside trusted friends Owen Spafford on viola, Martin Egidi on cello and Tennessee Woodiel on banjo – the songs became even more recognisable and alive to her. The abstract she was chasing was to make the album shimmer without dilution; to make it beautiful and bright but with a grounding intention, achieved best, it transpired, when she didn’t have to carry the weight of the songs alone.

“I want to be less precious with this,” she says. But she doesn’t need to worry – Wishbone is a remarkable collection, fuelled by the totality of a hope rather than a catalogue of experience. The last couple of years have put Mann on bigger and bigger stages, opening for Ben Howard, sharing rooms with the cathedral-sized melancholy of Youth Lagoon, and the shoe fits. Wishbone is the sound of an artist who has decided to want a good life out loud, and to keep deciding it, as she puts it, all the time. The Carax lovers get their fireworks over the Seine and then the morning after; Mann wants both, the exaltation and the cost, the bow drawn and the bone held.





Catch Clara on tour this autumn:
15.09.26 Hamburg, Germany - Reeperbahn Festival
16.09.26 Hamburg, Germany - Reeperbahn Festival
18.09.26 Vic, Spain - MMVV
26.09.26 Montpellier, France - International Guitar Festival
30.10.26 Lucerne, Switzerland - Echolot
15.11.26 Dublin - Sugar Club
24.11.26 Edinburgh - Pianodrome
25.11.26 Manchester - Halle St Michaels
28.11.26 Bantham - Outside
29.11.26 Bristol - Lantern Theatre at Bristol Beacon
04.12.26 London - St Matthias Church

Headline tour tickets on general sale Friday at 10am, for artist pre-sale sign up to Clara’s mailing list here