diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index fff51b8d..b234ab1a 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -2,7 +2,19 @@
 
 Notable changes, newest first. Dates are ISO 8601.
 
-## Unreleased
+## 1.5.0 — 2026-08-24
+
+A minor rather than a patch: the CLI accepts flags it used to refuse, `--verbose`
+shows a severity that was previously displayed nowhere, and `plainsong spec`
+exits non-zero on finding no specs where it used to exit 0. Nothing about the
+notation changes -- 6,321 files compile to exactly the music they did in 1.0.0,
+which the corpus fingerprint checks rather than assumes.
+
+The one thing to read before upgrading: **`plainsong spec` now fails when it
+finds nothing.** A script that ran it against an install missing its spec files
+and treated 0 as success will now see a failure. That is the point -- that exact
+silence is what let a broken package through a release.
+
 
 ### `--help` now shows the shape of the notation
 
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index a03958e8..39371a1c 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -498,7 +498,7 @@ in the documentation that stopped compiling would fail the build.
 
 ## Status
 
-Version 1.4. The notation, the CLI surface and the provider catalogue format are
+Version 1.5. The notation, the CLI surface and the provider catalogue format are
 stable; changes to them will go through a deprecation cycle.
 
 This release is a rebuild rather than an increment. The previous engine assumed a
diff --git a/plainsong/version.py b/plainsong/version.py
index a66a4261..4d41be20 100644
--- a/plainsong/version.py
+++ b/plainsong/version.py
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 """Single source of truth for the version number."""
 
-__version__ = "1.4.0"
+__version__ = "1.5.0"
 
 # Notation dialect versions this build understands.
 SUPPORTED_DIALECTS = ("absolute", "relative")
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 84283a36..d24d9f85 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"
 
 [project]
 name = "plainsong"
-version = "1.4.0"
+version = "1.5.0"
 description = "Plain-text music notation that compiles to MIDI and audio, with an embedded agent."
 readme = "README.md"
 requires-python = ">=3.10"