Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” is finally here.
In February, the pop superstar announced the album while accepting the Grammy award for best pop vocal album (for 2022′s “Midnights”).
“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 on social media on Friday. “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.”
Here’s what you should know about Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album:
A double album
Yes, the rollout Taylor Swift’s fifth album in nine years wasn’t without surprises. Two hours after she dropped “The Tortured Poets Department,” she released its second act: “The Anthology.” The extended version makes the album a whopping 31 tracks and two hours long.
Post Malone is on “Fortnight”
“Fortnight,” the opening track on “The Tortured Poets Department,” is also the album’s lead single. The track features the singer and rapper Post Malone (who seems to be the in-demand collaborator of the moment, as he was also featured on Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter”). The folksy pop song has groovy synths that make Swift and Malone’s melodies about a haunting romance sound thrilling.
“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,” Swift said.
Florence & the Machine, the only other featured artist on the album, appear on “Florida!!!.”
A Kim Kardashian diss?
“Thank You Aimee” is one of the final tracks on the double album that’s not included on the original. Stylized as “thanK you aIMee,” the song appears to be a diss track against Kim Kardashian, according to fans. In 2016, Kardashian’s then-husband Kanye West dropped a song titled “Famous,” from his album “The Life of Pablo.” On the song, he said, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that [expletive] famous.” Swift denied that she approved the lyric at the time. Subsequently, Kardashian posted an edited, recorded phone call between West and Swift, that led the public to believe otherwise.
Swift addressed the feud last year in an interview with Time.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she said. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
On “Thank You Aimee,” Swift takes jabs at a former bully.
“All that time you were throwin’ punches, I was buildin’ somethin’/ And I can’t forgive the way you made me feel/ Screamed, “[Expletive] you, Aimee” to the night sky as the blood was gushin’/ But I can’t forget the way you made me heal.”
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