For his next album, Leon Bridges is going international.
The Fort Worth-bred Grammy winner pulled the wraps off his fifth studio album Friday. It’s called Happiness Anytime, the follow-up to 2024’s Leon. In a break from past rollouts, Bridges is dropping the album in three phases, with the full 12-song collection available on Sept. 25.
The first batch of new songs — “Light the Way,” “Tears of Joy,” “Illusion” and “Your Love is Electric” — are out now, and you can listen to all four below. The next drop will be Aug. 21, and the final four-song cache arrives Sept. 25, the day of the full album’s release.
"I always tell the staff, the last words of a dying radio station are 'You always have done it this way,' and I think Leon has kind of taken that into the music side of things," said Benji McPhail, KXT program director, on the July 17 episode of NTX Now. "He continues to evolve on every single record. You never know what you're going to get, and man, I was not expecting this, but it's really good." (You can hear KXT's McPhail and Lesley James discuss Happiness Anytime here.)
The project is produced by Josh Lloyd-Watson and Lydia Kitto, two-thirds of British neo-soul band Jungle, and features Pino Palladino on bass. (Kitto is a guest vocalist on the seventh track, “All Day, All Night.”) Bridges focused on feeling and vocal performance, Lloyd-Watson shaped production and arrangements and Kitto weighed in on harmonic detail and melodic intuition.
“First thought is the best thought,” Lloyd-Watson said in a statement. “That’s where the emotion is. Anything after that becomes intellectualized, and that’s not really where music excels.”
Indeed, one of Bridges' greatest skills is his willingness and ability to freely collaborate with an eclectic array of musicians, and this latest effort plays directly into that strength. Happiness Anytime finds Bridges once again expanding his sonic palette, reaching back to the dance-oriented songs of 2018’s Good Thing but incorporating Afrobeat, South American rhythms, disco and soul to a degree he has not previously.
“For me, happiness is not a feeling that you chase,” Bridges said in a statement. “I want this album to be something that lingers with people and lingers in people’s bones. There’s this feeling that we have to fix the problems of the world; you feel inadequate or it can be debilitating. My role is to be light. I hope that comes across with this album.”
Get ready to dance
There’s certainly an infectious buoyancy to the first quartet of songs on offer, finding Bridges, a long-time aficionado of dance, embracing rhythm as well as shaking up his live presentation: These new songs will be presented in concert with a vinyl-spinning DJ, horn section and three backing vocalists, a pivot away from the R&B revue-style band he’s toured with for much of his career to date.
Bridges connected with Lloyd-Watson and Kitto at various festivals around the world, and as a one-off writing session yielded six songs, the trio found themselves in a recording studio in April 2025.
“Leon said he wants to have music that he can dance to,” Kitto said in a statement. “He wants to have moments where he can put the guitar down and just dance and perform at the front.”
In addition to putting the finishing touches on Happiness Anytime, Bridges popped up on a few singles throughout 2025, including Hermanos Guiterrez’s “Elegantly Wasted.” He also recently made a cameo during Shaboozey’s Tiny Desk Concert, alongside fellow Texan Sarah Jarosz. You can watch Bridges’ duet with Shaboozey on “Burn It Down” below.