Early on Friday morning, Taylor Swift, literary It Girl of the pop charts, dropped her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, and 15 surprise tracks, dubbed The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.
If listening to a double album in one sitting sounds tedious, well… that’s because it is. To be a citizen of the Taylor Nation requires a stratospheric level of stamina that’s just not demanded of most other fanbases. Swift simply doesn’t quit: After releasing her 2022 studio album, Midnights, the 34-year-old captivated millions of fans during her global Eras tour, which has grossed over $1 billion since it started in 2023, becoming the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. (Eras will resume in Nanterre, France, on May 9, kicking off a string of summer dates in Europe before Swift returns stateside for the second North American leg of her tour, concluding in Vancouver, Canada on December 8.)
That same year, Swift released complete re-recordings, or “Taylor’s Versions,” of her 2010 country classic, Speak Now, and her 2014 synth-pop masterpiece, 1989 (a reaction to losing her masters to Big Machine, her previous record label); and she ran a victory lap at the Grammy Awards this past February, when Midnights won both album of the year and best pop vocal album.
Yet, as Swift will attest, one can only experience so much growth before it becomes a liability. In the devil-may-care catharsis of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift dismantles the top-selling product she has become and reclaims the vulnerable person inside of it. “This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page,” she wrote in her album announcement on Friday. “Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”
Released at midnight, the first volume of The Tortured Poets Department is an uncut and uncensored chronicle of Swift’s love life, which is, somehow, more public now than ever before. This diaristic collection of songs comes after Swift announced her split with British actor Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend of six years, in April 2023. It also details a torrid summer fling with Matty Healy, the polemical lead singer of The 1975, as well as her ongoing romance with football star Travis Kelce, tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs, whose Super Bowl win she famously sealed with a kiss during the telecast.