Singer-songwriter Em Beihold knows a thing or two about shapeshifting. On her long-awaited debut album, Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter (Republic, 2026), she’s ready to tell all the ways she’s done that: in relationships, friendships, and most of all, as an artist.

 

But in order to make this album, Beihold needed to learn who she was when the shapeshifting stopped working.

 

When Em Beihold’s “Numb Little Bug” became a runaway hit, she was on top of the world. Her 2022 single about her experience taking antidepressants cracked the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached platinum status. By the time it broke through, Beihold was already several years into her career. She self-released her debut EP in 2017 and had found early success through a growing fandom on social media.

 

“Numb Little Bug” opened doors Beihold couldn’t have imagined before. In 2022, she appeared on a viral remix of Stephen Sanchez’s “Until I Found You.” She performed her hits on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Late Late Show With James Corden. She opened for acts like Jonas Brothers, Lewis Capaldi and King Princess before embarking on her own headlining tour in 2024. As the rollercoaster of the song’s momentum and a couple years straight of touring wore down, so did Beihold. She knew it was time for a debut album but she couldn’t crack the code.

 

“I had the worst kind of writer's block and identity crisis,” she says.”I didn’t even know what I was trying to make or say or what I liked.”

 

That feeling is particularly difficult to grapple with when your whole worth is tied to being an artist. She couldn’t see value in herself when she wasn’t able to write songs.

 

“When I was feeling so blocked, I'd spend hours at the piano and nothing would come out. I felt like maybe it was a power that I lost because I would process my emotions through writing, and when I couldn't write, I couldn't process.”

 

During her summer in outpatient therapy, Beihold returned to the artists who inspired her to write songs in the first place: Regina Spektor, Marina, Sara Bareilles, Feist, and Lily Allen. “When my body didn't feel like home, I went to the things that in the past made me feel like home,” she explains. Meanwhile, she found herself befriending many of the other patients seeking treatment—the older ones putting much of what she was going through into perspective. One even said something that helped spark Beihold’s return to self: “How would you feel if Regina Spektor tried to be Britney Spears?

 

When she felt ready to re-enter the studio, Beihold did so with two producers who finally understood her sound and voice: James Flannigan (Marina, Carly Rae Jepsen, Weezer) and Jason Suwito (Benson Boone, K.Flay).

 

“Meeting the right collaborator was sort of divine timing,” Beihold says. Before she entered outpatient treatment, she had been in a revolving door of failed sessions with other producers who weren’t the right fit.

The first track Beihold and Flannigan worked on together was the single “Brutus.” Beihold began writing the song during outpatient, channeling her feelings of comparing herself to her pop peers into a moment of relief that her writing spark was still alive.

She says the song is inspired by her experiences with comparison to peers who were blowing up while she felt stuck. “It was important for me to write a song about jealousy that didn't necessarily put the other person down but was about how intense the feelings could be. People say jealousy is a map of the things that you want and it can be embodied by a person.”

Other songs on Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter dig deep into her archives of journals and voice memos. Bits of “Scared of the Dark,” a song about co-dependency, were first written when Beihold was just 13.

“The album is about me trying to fit all these roles that weren’t natural to me,” she says. “Whether it was staying in the wrong relationships for sake of comfort or writing music that I thought was ‘cooler,’ I learned that you really can’t fake being in the wrong skin for too long. That will make itself known either consciously or subconsciously.”

When Beihold played some of the songs she had written for her A&R at Republic, they read the lyrics as a reflection on what it’s like to be a girl and how you could feel on top of the world one day then at the bottom the next. Beihold wanted to write a song that more directly spoke to that feeling and quickly penned “Hot Goblin” with Suwito and writing collaborator Nick Lopez.

As dark as the world became for Beihold, the world of Shapeshifter is a bright one. It’s always been a goal of hers to tackle the darkness with levity, and she accomplishes as much on her whimsical, smart and honest new project. And she’s doing so more certain than ever of who she is and what her powers are.

 

“I really hope the album emphasizes that it's okay to have these dark moments,” she says. “They really don't last forever even if you think they might.”