Beth Garrabrant
Taylor Swift’s new album “The Tortured Poets Department” is here!
The record, featuring collabs with Post Malone and Florence + The Machine, dropped at midnight ET, and is now available on Spotify!
She shared this message as the album dropped:
“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.”
The full track list includes:
Side A: “Fortnight (feat. Post Malone), “The Tortured Poets Department,” “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” and “Down Bad.”
Side B: “So Long, London,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” “Fresh Out the Slammer,” and “Florida!!! (feat Florence + The Machine).”
Side C: “Guilty as Sin?,” “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” and “loml.”
Side D: “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” “The Alchemy,” “Clara Bow,” and the bonus tune “The Manuscript.”
Taylor had been teasing the Swifties with Easter eggs all week long pointing to “Fortnight” as her lead single.
A music video for the song will drop on Friday at 8 p.m. ET, and Taylor has shared a teaser video! She posted the clip with the message, “At this hearing, I stand before my fellow members of The Tortured Poets Department with a summary of my findings.”
“Extra” spoke to Variety music editor Jem Aswad after he previewed the album, and he shared, “It’s much more raw about heartbreak than any of her albums before have been. It’s not, you know, the other ones had an element of revenge or anger or some sadness, but it was more from a distance. This one is really raw and immediate.”
While fans assumed the new album would dive deep into Taylor’s split from Joe Alwyn, Aswad said there also seemed to be quite a bit about Matty Healy!
Taylor rebounded with The 1975 singer soon after her split from Joe.
Aswad said, “Based on our conversations and what we’re seeing online, it looks like a lot of these songs are about Joe Alwyn, but also even more about Matty Healy from the 1975… They never really confirmed that relationship. That was a surprise, and it will be interesting to see what the reaction is.”
He noted, “I’ll just come out and say it: The first song on this album sounds like a 1975 song. That cannot be an accident. It’s not a coincidence, because… songs on both albums were produced by Jack Antonoff, who’s worked with Taylor for years. But it sounds kind of like a 1975 song, and I doubt that’s a coincidence.”
We know Swift’s current boyfriend Travis Kelce is a big fan of the album. He told “Extra’s” Jenny Taft back at the Super Bowl in February, “I have heard some of it, yes, and it’s unbelievable. I can’t wait for her to shake up the world when it finally drops.”