Claire Wellin (Youth in a Roman Field, San Fermin) has announced her debut solo album, The Sun and Fun Capital of the Midwest, due out June 26, 2026, via Better Company Records. On the record, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and violinist “pulls from interviews, family archives, and lived experience to map a lineage of women whose stories feel as urgent as they are inherited.”

The record, co-produced with Allen Tate, moves between past and present stitching together studio recordings, demos, and old cassettes. Lead single “Woman of the Future” has also been released, alongside a video, that focuses the statement of the album.

For “Woman of the Future”, the phrase comes from Wellin’s grandmother Helen, who once described her own mother-in-law, known in the family as Toots, as “kind of a woman of the future.” Toots had lived a full, independent life before marriage, worked as a teacher, had only one child, and spoke her mind without apology.

The song began with its chorus, which came to Wellin on her way to vote in 2024, and it took on new weight after the loss of both of her grandmothers. She returned to it later, finishing the track as a way of holding those stories close. Each verse sketches a different figure, including grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and a great aunt, and focuses on moments of defiance, strength, and self-definition.

Like much of the album, “Woman of the Future” has features of both documentation of lives and capturing feelings. With The Sun and Fun Capital of the Midwest, Wellin will “bring these songs into a live setting, giving shape to the stories that continue to unfold beyond the recording.”