Taylor Swift announces new album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

During the 66th Grammy Awards ceremony on Sunday Taylor Swift announced a new album, but not the one her fans were expecting: it will not be the anticipated re-recording of Reputation, her sixth studio album, but a completely new record: The Tortured Poets Department.

The singer was the last to arrive on the red carpet at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles and even host Trevor Noah joked that she was the last to enter the room. An hour and a half later, she took the stage to receive the best pop album award, for Midnights. It was the 13th Grammy of Swift’s career and her lucky number (it coincides with the date of her birthday, December 13), as she herself noted. As she picked it up, she thanked her fans, who have come in their millions to the 66 concerts she has already performed on The Eras Tour, her mega-tour that will take her to 40 cities around the world. “I want to say thank you to the fans by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years, which is that my brand new album comes out April 19,” she said. “It’s called The Tortured Poets Department. I’m gonna go post the cover backstage.”

Two minutes later the cover of the album was on social networks, and in just five minutes on Instagram it had almost three million likes. The album went on presale immediately on Swift’s website, with an average queue time of almost an hour to buy it in advance.

No one was expecting the arrival of Swift’s 11th album, but rather a re-recording. In 2018, the singer lost control over everything she had recorded between 2006 and 2017. From 2020, she re-recorded those albums again, starting with the second, then the third, fourth and fifth (Fearless, Speak Now, Red, and 1989). She has only the first, the self-titled Taylor Swift, and the sixth, Reputation, to record. Swift often leaves clues, called Easter eggs, in photographs, in the clothes she wears and in her activity on social networks. Going into the 66th Grammy gala, where she was nominated six times, she had been leaving a series of clues for her fans to unravel. It was expected that she would announce the re-release of that sixth album.

After her first six albums and Lover (2019), Folklore, Evermore (2020) and Midnights, this will be Swift’s 11th studio album. For the moment, the number of songs and subject matter is unknown; she has only published a few lines of what looks like a song, in her own handwriting, on her social networks.

Swift flies to Japan to resume The Eras Tour this week with four dates in Tokyo. She is then expected to return to the United States to attend the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, where her partner, Travis Kelce, will be representing the Kansas City Chiefs. In March she will perform in Australia and Singapore, before continuing her tour in May throughout Europe, before finishing in December in Canada.

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