Morgan Wallen is sending 2024 off with one final farewell, a somber new single titled “Smile.” The record, which arrived with no prior announcement, appeared alongside an accompanying music video set on New Year’s Eve.

Wallen engages in a bit of song inception in the video, which finds him performing on a New Year’s Eve special program. On the show, he’s meant to be performing “Love Somebody,” a song about longing. But he switches gears, ignoring the teleprompter and setting the performance instead to “Smile,” a song about loss.

“But it was good to see you smile/Girl you know it’s been a while/It was good to see you smile/Even if it was just for the picture,” he sings. “If someone were to see this they’d think everything’s alright/At least we got a pretty little moment frozen in time.”

After the release of One Thing at a Time in 2023, Wallen took on a lighter slate of releases in 2024. He appeared alongside Post Malone on the hit single “I Had Some Help” and joined Moneybagg Yo on “Whiskey Whiskey.” On his own, Wallen also shared “Cowgirls” featuring Ernest and the solo one-offs “Lies Lies Lies,” “Love Somebody,” and now “Smile.”

Rolling Stone recently named “I Had Some Help” as one of the best songs released in 2024, writing: “Few country songs this year have been as inescapable as Post Malone’s collab with Morgan Wallen. The Nashville newbie’s breakup song, off his F-1 Trillion album, basically says, ‘Hell, yeah, I’ve been spiraling, but it’s not just my own doing’ — and then cues up a monster chorus. Sure, ‘I Had Some Help’ has a few hints of Kip Moore’s 2012 rocker ‘Beer Money’ in its DNA (that intro!), but Malone and Wallen’s swerving vocals makes it distinctly their own. Passing the blame has never sounded so fun.”