As insomniac Taylor Swift devotees counted down the minutes to the release of The Tortured Poets Department at midnight ET on April 19, their idol had one more surprise in store.
Just two hours after dropping the album – her 11th studio release and the follow-up to 2022’s Midnights, which bagged Swift her fourth Grammy Award for Album Of The Year – she revealed that the record is actually a double album, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, containing an additional 15 tracks.
Writing on her social media feeds, she said: “It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album. 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 installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”
Naturally, fans freaked out – and not just because it meant staying awake a little longer than expected.
“GIRL I’M ABOUT SH-T MYSELF” read one comment, which gathered more than 8,000 likes. “YOU ARE LITERALLY A GENIUS AND MY WORST NIGHTMARE AT THE SAME TIME I LOVE YOU” wrote another, immediately prompting over 300 retweets and 5,000 likes. Another wrote simply: “TAYLOR I HAVE A JOB OH MY GOD”.
It remains unclear why the favored format for online reactions was all capital letters and no punctuation, but that may be sleep deprivation for you.
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The album contains references to poets including Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith, as well as Swift's confessional lyricism.
The Tortured Poets Department (or the first half of it at least) had dropped at midnight ET, with Swift announcing:
“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.”
Despite the frenzied social media reaction, the double album does not contain any huge musical surprises, sticking broadly to the warm, melodic, mostly-electronic vibe of Midnights, while also containing an intensely personal lyricism that have led many to speculate that the inspiration for the album came from her short relationship with The 1975’s Matty Healy.
Swift had previously described the creation of the album as a realization of “why songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life,” adding, “I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets”. There are also references to poets including Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith.
The entire double album is now available as a single 31-track entity, running to a little over two hours in total. Stream the full album below.
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