Los Angeles, CA – Today, singer-songwriter Conner Cherland has reemerged with a luminous and deeply personal new album, It’s So Good To See You, just two years after releasing his first full-length record. Spanning eight tracks, this project is a bold evolution of both sound and self. 

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The album opens with the lighthearted single “I Made a Friend in LA,” an account of Cherland’s first months living in Los Angeles. Though the city is notorious for shmoozing and surface-level interactions, Cherland protests on the song’s chorus, “I made a friend in LA, and he’s a good one!” Right off the bat, the album is adamant about the possibility for belonging.

 

Indeed, a major theme present throughout the project is that the reward of true intimacy is earned with continuous, long-term effort. In “It’s So Good to See You,” Cherland muses, “It’s so good to see you, close like family should’ve felt… back then when nobody knew me, you tried to figure me out.” And then again in “Swim”: “I have watched you change, watched you fall apart, I have known you so long that I don't know what you are. But, you swim beside me in the dark.”

 

At the same time, Cherland has found himself developing a fierce self-reliance in recent years that translated over to the making of this album. Fully self-produced, It’s So Good To See You reveals a newfound creative confidence, pairing Cherland’s seasoned guitar chops with adventurous harmonies, and, for the first time in his career, a song on acoustic piano. 

 

This technical maturity is set against a backdrop of personal introspection. A question that kept coming back to him when writing this album was, how do you solidify the part of yourself that knows what it wants to be? The result is a record that feels both grounded and expansive. 

 

It’s So Good To See You also marks a shift visually, as Cherland appears on an album cover for the very first time—even if masked by a beetle’s head. The inspiration for the cover art came to him as he was wandering alone through the Natural History Museum’s 2025 Bug Fair. “So much of what I do is performance,” he admits, “and that started to bleed into my life. These insects were so small but meant so much to me, and that instilled a weird sense of power and confidence,” he reflects. In that sense, the mask isn’t a way to hide, but a reclamation of the self.

 

During that same visit, Cherland saw a spider molting, coming slowly out of its carapace. “The way it shrunk and expanded as it left [the shell], it looked like lungs breathing. It was beautiful.” he remarked. That’s what this album is: a shedding. A becoming.