By Melanie Goodfellow, Zac Ntim
Taylor Swift‘s eagerly awaited new LP The Tortured Poets Department dropped in the early hours of Friday with a surprise double album format and 15 additional songs.
“It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album,” Swift wrote in an early morning Instagram post.
“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 instalment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”
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In an earlier post, the star described the album as, “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.”
Adding: “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 launch was greeted with feverish speculation over who was the target of embittered lyrics in a clutch of songs about failed relationships, particularly in two tracks entitled, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived and Guilty as Sin?.
The performer did not give names but Taylor Swift pundits were quick to speculate that she was alluding to 1975 frontman Matty Healy, who she dated briefly in 2023.
UK tabloid newspaper The Sun suggested in a front-page splash that former long-time boyfriend and actor Joe Alwyn was the subject of her wrath.
Another track The Alchemy, featuring American football references, appears to have been inspired by her new relationship with Kansas City Chiefs American football star Travis Kelce.
The Tortured Poets Department is Swift’s 11th studio album and comes hot on the heels of the star’s blockbuster The Eras Tour, which became the first ever tour to surpass $1B in revenue and travels to the UK and Europe from May.
The response to the album by music journalists, who were left scrambling by the drop of 15 unexpected extra tracks, has been mixed so far.
“There’s a lot going on it. It lives up to the billing in terms of the intrigue people wanted out of it. I would say The Sun is wrong, the song is about Matt Healy from the 1975,” Deputy music editor at The Guardian Laura Snape told the BBC’s Today morning news and current affairs program.
“There’s a Taylor Swift industrial complex at this point… there will be thousands of articles published today working out what the songs are about… The intrigue in the lyrics is somewhat predicated on gossip and I found that after three or four listens to this album, or at least the first half, once you’ve drained the fact out of it, I wasn’t quite sure what the replay factor would be.”
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