Luke Combs Teases Another Snippet of ‘Sleepless in a Hotel Room’ Ahead of New Album

New year, new album - new Luke?

January typically brings with it a sense of anticipation and optimism, as we cast our gaze towards the year ahead, and jot down our hopes and goals for the next twelve months.

It's a time when newness is the tonic of the day. Phrases like “out with the old, in with the new” and “new year, new me” are sprinkled incessantly across our Instagram feeds, often accompanied by artsy sunrise photos and minimalist quote graphics.

But as he gears up to release his eagerly awaited new album, Luke Combs seems to be taking the opposite approach. Rather than looking to the future, the North Carolina native has decided to trawl through old demos and early unreleased snippets.

Just this week, for instance, Combs took to social media to share another clip of his unreleased ode, ‘Sleepless in a Hotel Room’, all but confirming this will be his next single. He first teased it back in 2020 during quarantine, when the ’Beer Never Broke My Heart’ hitmaker was missing his wife, Nicole, while away from home for a show.

Similarly, in November, Combs shared a throwback to another COVID-era song, ’Ever Mine’, which never made it onto an album, hinting that he would soon give it an official release.

Now, this could simply be the latest instance in what we're calling ‘the Lost Files era’, where fans become increasingly obsessed with unreleased deep cuts, and artists oblige by dropping them on streaming platforms, often many years after they were written. We saw this on Tyler Childers’ 2025 album, Snipe Hunter, on which he finally released ‘Nose on the Grindstone’ and ‘Oneida’ (but not ‘Jersey Giant’).

Yet this approach carries the danger of making this next era of music feel routine and monotonous, where we've already heard most of the tracklist before it's released.

Maxim's Take:

“There's undoubtedly an appeal to finding lesser-known b-sides from artists’ back catalogues, as it makes you feel as though you're one of the few fans to uncover them. It gives you a sense of being a true aficionado, a listener who can scoff when someone says their favourite Luke Combs song is ‘Fast Car’ or ‘Beautiful Crazy’.

So we get it. But at the same time, when Combs has been facing criticism over his past three albums for being a tad uninventive and repetitive, it feels like a risky move to fill his next chapter of music with material he wrote around five or six years ago.

We wouldn't want Combs to simply prioritise more recent material over his earlier demos purely for the sake of newness. But his fanbase are craving something fresh and innovative. We got a fleeting taste of this on his genre-blurring BigXthaPlug collaboration, ‘Pray Hard’. It saw Combs injecting a sense of verve and gravitas into his gravelly vocals, with the choral backing adding a level of atmosphere and intensity we've only heard lately on deep cuts such as ’Fox in the Henhouse’.

We're excited to hear the full versions of both ‘Sleepless in a Hotel Room’ and ‘Ever Mine’, and there will surely be fanfare around the arrivals of both. However, if Combs is to make any headway in re-establishing himself as country music's dominant artist, and reclaim the throne from Morgan Wallen - who is streets ahead in streaming might, mainstream success and ticket sales - we need more signs of evolution. Recent singles such as ‘Giving Her Away’ and ‘Back in the Saddle’ are solid country earworms, but they're cut from the same old playbook. Combs is a strong enough writer and a musically curious enough artist to give us more”.

For more on Luke Combs, see below: