diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index ce24c1ab51a9..78102c0351cf 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -7,8 +7,8 @@ This document contains a historical list of changes between releases. Only
 changes that impact end-user behavior are listed; changes to documentation or
 internal API changes are not present.
 
-Main (unreleased)
------------------
+v0.42.0-rc.0 (2024-07-18)
+-------------------------
 
 ### Security fixes
 
diff --git a/docs/sources/_index.md b/docs/sources/_index.md
index 78bdf97881df..a909ec42a2ea 100644
--- a/docs/sources/_index.md
+++ b/docs/sources/_index.md
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ title: Grafana Agent
 description: Grafana Agent is a flexible, performant, vendor-neutral, telemetry collector
 weight: 350
 cascade:
-  AGENT_RELEASE: v0.41.1
+  AGENT_RELEASE: v0.42.0-rc.0
   OTEL_VERSION: v0.96.0
 refs:
   variants:
diff --git a/static/operator/defaults.go b/static/operator/defaults.go
index 406877a5df21..eef0f49d4b02 100644
--- a/static/operator/defaults.go
+++ b/static/operator/defaults.go
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ package operator
 
 // Supported versions of the Grafana Agent.
 var (
-	DefaultAgentVersion   = "v0.41.1"
+	DefaultAgentVersion   = "v0.42.0-rc.0"
 	DefaultAgentBaseImage = "grafana/agent"
 	DefaultAgentImage     = DefaultAgentBaseImage + ":" + DefaultAgentVersion
 )
diff --git a/tools/gen-versioned-files/agent-version.txt b/tools/gen-versioned-files/agent-version.txt
index d0cca40aac25..8fc7b747143e 100644
--- a/tools/gen-versioned-files/agent-version.txt
+++ b/tools/gen-versioned-files/agent-version.txt
@@ -1 +1 @@
-v0.41.1
+v0.42.0-rc.0
\ No newline at end of file