The wait is finally over — The Tortured Poets Department has officially opened its doors.
Taylor Swift released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, on Friday, April 19. Swift shows off her lyrical prowess on the 16-track album, which features songs inspired by her love life and include collaborations with Post Malone, Florence and the Machine’s Florence Welch and more.
“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,” Swift wrote via Instagram after the album dropped. “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.”
She continued, “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 TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT IS OUT NOW.”
Following TTPD’s release, Swift, 34, is set to release the music video for her and Malone’s collab “Fortnight,” which she previously revealed is the album’s first single on Thursday, April 18.
Everything to Know About ‘The Tortured Poets Department’
“I’ve been such a huge fan of Post because of the writer he is, his musical experimentation and those melodies he creates that just stick in your head forever. I got to witness that magic come to life firsthand when we worked together on Fortnight,” she captioned a pic of the two of them via Instagram, revealing the video drops at 8 p.m. ET on Friday.
Swift kicked off her latest musical era earlier this year by announcing TTPD at the 2024 Grammys. “[The way I can celebrate] is by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the past two years, which is that my brand new album comes out April 19th,” she announced while accepting the award for Best Pop Vocal Album for Midnights in February.
In true Swift fashion, she continued to build hype for TTPD by announcing multiple bonus versions of the album featuring exclusive singles and dropping dozens of Easter eggs for Swifties.
“I needed to make it. It was really a lifeline for me,” Swift said of writing the album during a February Eras Tour concert in Melbourne, Australia. “It sort of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through life and I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than it needed it on Tortured Poets.”
Taylor Swift’s Literary References Before ‘The Tortured Poets Department’
In addition to sharing a handful of TTPD lyrics ahead of its release, Swift also debuted five curated playlists on Apple Music based on the five stages of heartbreak: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.
Giving insight into the themes of TTPD, each playlist was named after a track on the album: “I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life Songs,” “You Don’t Get to Tell Me About Sad Songs,” “Am I Allowed to Cry? Songs,” “Old Habits Die Screaming Songs” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart Songs.”
Two days before TTPD came out, X banned certain search terms on its platform amid reports a Google Drive file containing a leak of the album was floating around the internet. Swifties quickly showed their support for Swift, who did not publicly address the alleged leak at the time.
“Stop f—king saying anything about TTPD, idc if you aren’t posting the song if you heard a leak or a ‘leak,’ don’t say anything on the TL, got it? It’s that easy,” one fan wrote via social media, while another commented, “Quick, everyone start making fake ai tracks for TTPD so we don’t know if the leaks are real or not.”
