Everything We Know About Taylor’s New Album “The Tortured Poets Department” So Far!

By Kayla Harper

The now 14-time Grammy winner, Taylor Swift, shook the world on Sunday when she announced her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department.  This was especially shocking because we all assumed she was announcing Reputation (Taylor’s Version) due to various clues, one of them being that the singer changed her social media profile photo to black and white earlier the same day.

When Swift arrived at the awards ceremony dressed in a white gown and black gloves, no one knew at the time that this was alluding to a new era.

Swift accepted her award for Best Pop Vocal Album with a suspecting smirk and during her speech she said, “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 19th.  It’s called The Tortured Poets Department. I’m gonna go post the cover now backstage.  Thank you, I love you.”

Swifties around the world started spiralling at the intriguing title and cover which already set the album apart from anything Swift has done prior.  However, it’s monochromatic album cover and poetic aspect seems to call back to themes within her 2020 pandemic albums,  folklore and evermore. Though details about the albums actual sound and meaning have yet to be revealed, here is all the information we have so far on Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department.

Swift shared the following post to Instagram immediately following the album announcement which shares the album cover as well as what we could assume is lyrics: “And so I enter into evidence / My tarnished coat of arms / My muses acquired like bruises / My talismans and charms / the tick, tick, tick of love bombs/ My veins of pitch black ink.”  She signs it, “All’s fair in love and poetry… Sincerely The Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department.”

 

 

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A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)

Along with the announcement of the album was a merchandise drop on Swift’s website.  This featured a double LP pressed on ghost white vinyl, CD, as well as a collectors CD which contained various other collectors items such as a magnet, bookmark, photo-cards, etc.  Through the merchandise descriptions on Swift’s website we were able to learn that the standard edition of the album contains sixteen tracks and the deluxe versions will have one bonus track titled “The Manuscript”.

It was only a day later that Swift posted the entire tracklist on Instagram.  Which some believe is due to the tracklist being leaked only hours after it was announced.  Knowing Swift, she probably had a much more entertaining way to reveal these track titles, however, solving puzzles is no fun when you already have all of the answers.

 

 

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A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)

The tracklist reads as follows:

1. Fortnight (Featuring Post Malone)

2. The Tortured Poets Department

3. My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys

4. Down Bad

5. So Long, London

6. But Daddy I Love Him

7. Fresh Out The Slammer

8. Florida!!! (Featuring Florence + The Machine)

9. Guilty As Sin?

10. Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?

11. I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)

12. loml

13. I Can Do It With A Broken Heart

14. The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived

15. The Alchemy

16. Clara Bow

17. The Manuscript

 

The tracklist is immediately intriguing because these are titles unlike anything we have heard from Swift before.  It’s giving Lana Del Rey style alternative… Arctic Monkey’s vibes even.  It is even more exciting after seeing the tracklist to imagine what this album is going to sound like and what angle Swift will take with each of these songs.  We can already see allusions to other great works of art such as The Little Mermaid in the title “But Daddy I Love Him”, as well as old Hollywood stars i.c. “Clara Bow”.

At Swift’s return to the Eras Tour after a much deserved break in Tokyo on February 7th, she reveals that if she did not win at the Grammy’s “[Her] back-up plan [was] that [she] was going to do it…in Tokyo.”  Swift goes on to further disclose, “[She’s] been working on Tortured Poets since right after [she] turned in Midnights…and [She’s] been working on it for about two years.”  The Tortured Poets Department was an ongoing project throughout the U.S. leg of Swift’s Eras Tour last year and continued to be until Swift felt it was “good enough for [the fans].”

From what has been confirmed so far, The Tortured Poets Department seems like it is going to be an entirely new angle for Swift, from the monochromatic, old-timey writer aesthetic to the fascinating track titles, fans cannot wait to hear more about this new album!