Avalon Emerson & The Charm Releases New Album ‘Written into Changes’

Avalon Emerson & the Charm releases the new album Written into Changes via Dead Oceans. Written into Changes is an album about not just accepting change, but embracing it with a full wingspan. Progression is a theme both on record and behind the scenes, so that “written into changes” describes a conscious approach to expression and life itself. Alongside the album release, Avalon shares the Tim Barber-directed and Ryan Nethery-shot and edited music video filmed in upstate New York. Avalon recently opened the doors to her upstate home to The New York Times where they discussed Written into Changes, her DJ career, and her creative output as & the Charm. To celebrate Written into Changes, Avalon will take over The Lot Radio today from 4pm to 7pm with friends, special guests, and more. Check out the stream HERE. 

Speaking about the album and “Happy Birthday, Avalon shares, “Making ‘Written into Changes’ felt like unlocking a fence and running into a big green field. I wanted to be more direct and vulnerable with my lyrics and voice, and for the instrumentation I wanted to be bolder. This album is a collection of songs about change, shards of life, and relationships whose echoes I still feel every day. I collaborated with old friends, like Bullion, Hunter and Keivon, and also new producers and musicians such as Rostam, Jay Flew, and other brilliant musicians. We made this record in the English countryside, London, and LA. I love making this kind of music and I’m so happy people can hear this album now.

The song ‘Happy Birthday’ was one of the last songs to really come together on the album. It underwent many different skins and styles before landing in the place it finally knew it needed to be, and it’s one of my favorites on the album. We shot the music video last week upstate at my friend Tim Barber’s home (who also directed it along with DP Ryan Nethery).

Written into Changes is the second album released under the Avalon Emerson & the Charm moniker and includes the previously shared tracks “Eden,” “Written into Changes,” and “Jupiter and Mars.” The memoiristic album is the product of five years of constant travel – including multinational DJing and moving from Berlin to Los Angeles to New York  – Written into Changes reveals itself not just geographically, but over time. The making of Written into Changes was very different from that of & the Charm. “For the first album, the songs were pretty soft and kind of bedroomy,” Emerson observes. “And then playing them on a big kind of festival stage was a learning experience. Coming back into the studio for a second round, it was important to think about the dynamics and energy of what we were making and how they might be performed in the future.” With that in mind, Avalon went back to her collaborators to make a body of work that is band-driven but groove-heavy and dance-adjacent. It is a work of rigorous invention and revision that found the working versions of some songs hopping genres before settling into their final forms.

Avalon Emerson & the Charm will embark on a string of European shows this year to celebrate the release of Written into Changes across Manchester, London, Paris, Berlin and more. Additionally, Avalon Emerson & the Charm will be playing headline shows in California following a performance at C2C Festival in New York City this May. Avalon Emerson will also perform DJ sets at Lightning in a Bottle in Bakersfield, California, Down The Rabbit Hole in Ewijk, Netherlands and Kappa FuturFestival in Turin, Italy. Full live dates are below and you can purchase tickets HERE. 

The cohort that came together to help create Written into Changes with Avalon includes Nathan Jenkins (Bullion), who co-produced & the Charm and came back to handle a bulk of the new project along with co-production from Rostam Batmanglij (formerly of Vampire Weekend) and assistance from Keivon Mehdi Hobeheidar, who plays bass on several tracks and cello on a few others; Jay Flew, a multi-instrumentalist who was involved in the initial writing sessions; and Avalon’s wife Hunter Lombard, who plays guitar. Much of the initial recording took place in Braintree, England, in the winter into spring of 2024. The tracks with Batmanglij were cut in Los Angeles. Synth touches were added at the Synth Cabin at Rosen Sound in Glendale, California. Instead of designating a set band with every member adhering to a defined role, the “& the Charm” moniker describes a “collaborative entity” of musicians who work on this arm of Avalon’s creative output.

Avalon Emerson has solidified her position as one of the most respected DJs and dynamic artists from her beginnings in San Francisco’s warehouse scene to her time living and playing in Berlin, performing at the legendary Berghain and other famed clubs for over a decade. Now back in the United States and living in upstate New York, Avalon has been flexing other musical muscles. The aforementioned album, & the Charm, was released to broad acclaim in 2023 and introduced the live band element to Avalon’s musicianship. Co-produced with now frequent  collaborator Nathan Jenkins (aka Bullion), & the Charm showcased Avalon’s distinctive range—with a rare ability to move fluidly between euphoric, high-BPM dance music and intimate indie pop. In 2025, Avalon released a modern re-work of a classic Moby track, “E After Next,” as part of her Perpetual Emotion Machine series, a string of conceptually linked singles with her new label, Dead Oceans.

Check out Written into Changes and watch “Happy Birthday” above, see full live dates below, and stay tuned for more from Avalon Emerson & the Charm coming very soon.