On Sunday night, Taylor Swift won her 13th Grammy Award in the Best Pop Vocal Album category for Midnights, and announced during her acceptance speech, that she has a brand new album coming out. While Swift’s fans were expecting her to announce her fifth re-recorded album, Reputation (Taylor’s Version), the pop star shocked everyone by revealing a new project, her eleventh studio album.
In her speech, Swift said she wanted to thank fans by letting them in on a secret she’d been keeping for two years. “My brand-new album comes out April 19th,” Swift said during her acceptance speech. “It’s called The Tortured Poets Department. I’m going to go and post the cover right now backstage.”
While kicking off the next leg of the Eras Tour in Tokyo on Wednesday, Swift gave a little context on the work she’d put into the album.
“I’ve been working on Tortured Poets since right after I turned in Midnights,” she told the crowd. “I’ve been working on it for about two years. I worked on it throughout the US tour. Soon we’ll get to hear it together.”
Here’s everything to know about The Tortured Poets Department.
The Tortured Poets Department will be released on April 19. Swift made the album available for pre-order on her website after announcing it at the Grammys.
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On Monday, Swift dropped the official tracklist for the new album. The Tortured Poets Department will feature 16 songs and one bonus track, titled “The Manuscript.” Other titles include: “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.”
The Tortured Poets Department has two features. The first track, “Fortnight,” includes a feature by Post Malone and the song “Florida!!!” features Florence and the Machine.
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Following Swift’s announcement, fans online began looking for meanings and clues behind the details she gave. According to some on the internet, the title of the album seems to nod to her ex-boyfriend, Joe Alwyn. In 2022, during Alwyn’s Actors on Actors interview with Paul Mescal, he revealed that he was in a group chat with Mescal and actor Andrew Scott called “The Tortured Man Club.”
Write to Moises Mendez II at [email protected]