Surprise — Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department Is A Double Album
In February, Taylor Swift announced her eleventh LP The Tortured Poets Department while accepting her 13th Grammy. A few days after the announcement, the tracklist leaked and the pop star shared it herself. Now, the album is out.
The Tortured Poets Department is the follow-up to 2022’s Midnights, which also won a Grammy for Album Of The Year, her fourth time doing so. It’s produced by her frequent collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, and has Post Malone featured on the opener, “Fortnight,” and Florence + The Machine featured on “Florida!!!.” The sonic palette doesn’t stray far from the warm synthy ambiance of Midnights. The lyrics are full of unexpected name-drops: Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith, Charlie Puth, Lucy (presumably Dacus), Jack (presumably Antonoff). It’s predominantly a breakup album, speculated to be about Matty Healy.
Yesterday, Swift announced “Fortnight” as the single, and the video arrives tonight at 8PM EST. “I’ve been such a huge fan of Post because of the writer he is, his musical experimentation and those melodies he creates that just stick in your head forever,” she wrote on X. “I got to witness that magic come to life firsthand when we worked together on Fortnight.”
Upon its release tonight Swift shared this statement:
The Tortured Poets Department. An anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.
And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.
UPDATE: Surprise — The Tortured Poets Department is a double album. At 2AM, Swift shared 15 additional tracks. She writes:
It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album. ✌️ I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours. 🤍
Stream The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology below.
