Cecil Opia Announces New Album Ghosts and Phone Calls
©Cecil Opia
Finnish alt-pop artist, producer, and songwriter Cecil Opia is set to release her deeply personal new album, Ghosts and Phone Calls, on September 25, 2026.
Exploring themes of digital loneliness, emotional disconnection, queer desire, identity, and isolation, the album captures the emotional realities of modern relationships in a world where intimacy often exists through screens.
A Soundtrack for the Unanswered Messages
Ghosts and Phone Calls feels like a roadside motel room.
Inside are unanswered phone calls, text messages left on read, breakups unfolding through screens, restless nights, body dysphoria, insecurity, and thoughts that never quite become complete sentences.
It is a place where people come and go. A place where intimacy can disappear with the press of a button. A place where being constantly connected does not necessarily make anyone feel less alone.
The album takes its name from the two things that haunt its world most: ghosts and phone calls.
Ghosting. Missed connections. The feeling of becoming a ghost yourself — present, but somehow detached from everyone around you.
Between Helsinki and Berlin
Opia wrote the album between Helsinki and Berlin, two cities that became central to the emotional landscape of the record.
After relocating to Berlin, she found herself living alone in a small room, far from the people and places she knew. That sense of displacement became inseparable from the music she was creating.
The album also emerged in the aftermath of an almost eight-year relationship ending abruptly through a single phone call received in that same room.
“ As a queer trans woman, I’ve often felt like I’m standing just outside the room, even when I’m inside it. I could be in Helsinki and feel disconnected, then move to Berlin and realise the feeling had followed me. The album became a way of documenting that distance. ”
A New Chapter in Cecil Opia's Sound
Musically, Ghosts and Phone Calls represents a major evolution in Opia's artistic identity. Drawing inspiration from alternative pop, late-1990s trip-hop, shoegaze, and early-2000s aesthetics, the album moves fluidly between intimacy and fragility, euphoric highs and raw emotional energy.
Its songwriting is also more direct than ever before, embracing vulnerability while placing queer experiences firmly at the center of the narrative.
Songs That Explore Identity, Desire and Liberation
The album's lead single, “This Body,” confronts gender dysphoria and the often complicated relationship between identity and the physical self.
Meanwhile, focus track “Text Messages” captures the obsessive emotional spiral that can emerge when longing for someone who has stopped responding.
Another standout track, “Fluorescent,” celebrates queer joy, sexual liberation, and self-discovery. Through the intimacy of self-pleasure, the song transforms solitude into something sensual, euphoric, and empowering.
International Collaborations Reflect the Album's Themes
Themes of communication and disconnection extend into the album's guest features. Finnish-French artist yaya (Sony Music) appears in French, while ÄmbÖ (Fountain Records) contributes a feature in Japanese.
For Opia, these language choices were intentional.
“I wanted the features to be in languages I don’t speak. It creates this feeling that even when you’re hearing another person, you can’t completely understand them. That felt very true to what the album is about.”
Much of the album was written collaboratively with yaya, who is also Opia's best friend. The track “Fluorescent” was co-written with Mendi Moon (Ranka Entertainment).
Entirely Produced by Cecil Opia
©Cecil Opia
Despite its collaborative writing process, Ghosts and Phone Calls remains fully rooted in Opia's own creative vision.
Every song on the album was produced and mixed by Cecil Opia herself, reinforcing the deeply personal nature of the project.
The album was mastered by Tommi Vainikainen and Stefan Brown at Abbey Road Studios, bringing the record's expansive emotional world to its final form.
Release Date
Ghosts and Phone Calls will be released worldwide on September 25, 2026.
For listeners drawn to alternative pop, queer storytelling, emotional vulnerability, and atmospheric soundscapes, Cecil Opia's latest work promises to be one of the year's most intimate and compelling releases. It is an album about being left on read.
About wanting someone who is no longer there.
About staring at your phone, hoping it lights up.
About leaving a place and realizing you never felt at home there.
And sometimes, about finally turning the phone off.
GHOSTS AND PHONE CALLS.
The line is still open.
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