After months of speculation and anticipation, Taylor Swift has finally released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, on Friday, April 19. Swift made good on her self-ordained Mastermind title, serving fans up a surprise at 2 a.m. EST: Instead of the expected 16 tracks and four bonus songs, Swift announced a “secret DOUBLE album,” bringing the total number of songs to 31 on what she has dubbed the The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.
The full Anthology edition is currently only available online as a digital album, perhaps as a measure to prevent the second half of the album leaking ahead of release, as the standard edition did. However, a recent teaser video had a notable mention of Record Store Day on April 20, which may be a hint at where fans can expect the physical edition to be found first.
Through the two-dozen plus songs Swift released, the singer lays bare her turbulent past two years, which included the end of her long-term relationship with actor Joe Alwyn (“The Black Dog”), a highly discussed entanglement with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy (“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”), and a new relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce (“The Alchemy”). Oh, and there’s the matter of that grueling ongoing world tour, the re-recording of her prior albums in a sort of ongoing high-stakes royalty grudge match with Scooter Braun, grappling with her fame (“Clara Bow”) and the highs and lows that come with it (“But Daddy I Love Him”), along with the minutia of everyday life, coffees and playing Grand Theft Auto (“So High School”).
In the closing minutes of her 2020 Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, Swift laid bare how she wanted to live her life, saying, “I want to still have a sharp pen and a thin skin and an open heart.” And this one plays like the 34-year-old has used that sharp pen to open a vein, not to mention her journal. The Tortured Poets Department isn’t her longest album (Red (Taylor’s Version) beats the runtime by eight minutes, thanks to that legendary 10-minute version of “All Too Well”), but its lyrics appear to be the most confessional, especially considering the many references on the album to marriage and babies.
Every track features Swift as the sole or cowriter, and producer Jack Antonoff, with whom Swift has collaborated on all of her albums since 2014’s 1989, is listed as co-writer on several tracks. The National’s Aaron Dessner, who played a key role in Swift’s pandemic-era Folklore and Evermore albums and is also a producer on The Tortured Poets Department, helped pen some, and Post Malone (credited as Austin Post) and Florence Welch each got credits on the songs they perform on, “Fortnight (Feat. Post Malone)” and “Florida!!!” respectively.
In her midnight tweet officially introducing the standard version of the album to the world, Swift wrote, “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.”