State Champ Radio The Tortured Poets Department
This week, Taylor Swift made history in more ways than one with the release of her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. But perhaps the most mind-boggling of all the records she set was the first-week vinyl sales for the album, which came in at 859,000 — by far the largest sales week for a vinyl album in the modern era, blowing past the second-largest week by more than 160,000 units.
That second-largest week, by the way? The debut frame of her last release, 1989 (Taylor’s Version), which sold 693,000 vinyl copies in the week ending Nov. 2, 2023. In fact, Swift has the top four biggest vinyl sales weeks in history — all of which have come in the past 18 months — and six of the top eight, reflecting not just the industry-wide popularity boom for the format, but her own evolving strategy and emphasis on physical media and fan-focused collectibles.
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For Tortured Poets, Swift released six different vinyl variations (in addition to nine CD versions and four cassette versions), four of which were available widely and two of which were exclusives, one signed iteration through her own web store and one through Target. Of the four widely available, each included a different bonus track, and each have individually sold enough copies to top the vinyl sales charts for the week: the Manuscript edition (342,000); the Bolter edition (85,000); the Black Dog edition (79,000); and the Albatross edition (62,000).
That’s a continuation of the strategy she’s deployed in force since her, for lack of a better phrase, pandemic albums, Folklore and Evermore. And it’s a shining success story for how artists have been capitalizing on the resurrection of vinyl as not just physical art piece but also merch item, as the format has continued to surge for 18 years in a row, having hit 43.2 million U.S. sales in 2023, amounting to $1.35 billion in revenue, according to the RIAA.
Swift’s own career, in terms of album output, has grown along with that trend. Her self-titled debut album was released 18 years ago, in October 2006, a year when vinyl revenue sales in the U.S. were a mere $23.7 million. At that point, vinyl was such a niche market (and Swift was such a new artist) that for Taylor Swift and her second album, Fearless, Swift didn’t even release vinyl editions until May 2016, when they sold 500 copies and 1,000 copies, respectively, in their first week of availability. By the time of 2010’s Speak Now, Swift’s star power was much more formidable, but vinyl was still pretty niche; all vinyl sales in the U.S. that year accumulated $124.2 million, according to the RIAA, and Speak Now moved 500 copies in its first week.
Red, in 2012, was a true breakthrough moment for Swift in terms of her pop career, and the vinyl business had itself added nearly $100 million in value in just two years, to $213.3 million; Red sold 1,000 copies in the first week it came out in the format. Two years later, when she released 1989, the vinyl industry had added another $100 million per year, and the standard vinyl moved 11,000 copies in its first week of availability. For 2017’s Reputation, a slightly delayed street date release led to a 9,000 sale week in what was technically its second week of availability, with Swift still sticking to the standard vinyl option.
It was for Lover that Swift’s strategy first began to change, as she began experimenting with vinyl offerings beyond the standard black record, and the numbers began to really jump. When the album came out on the format in November 2019, it was as a colored double-vinyl, sold exclusively at Target, which helped boost that first-week number to 18,000 copies — at the time, the largest vinyl sales week by a woman since Adele’s 25 during Christmas week 2015 (reflected on the Jan. 9, 2016, chart). By 2019, vinyl sales in the U.S. had reach the half-billion-dollar mark — and the real jump for the format was on the horizon.
The figures for Folklore — 9,000 copies week one — at first may seem like a regression. But the pandemic brought about two competing trends: both an aggressive jump in the popularity of vinyl, and vast, industry-wide supply-chain issues related to the production of it. Since Folklore was a surprise release on July 24, 2020, the vinyl was delayed until November; but Swift sold digital-physical bundles when the album was first released, meaning that the digital sale was counted during the July release week, but when the vinyl finally shipped in November — the first-week availability tracked here — the sales were not counted as vinyl, as they had already been counted as digital. (The chart rules have since changed so they are no longer counted together.) So while Folklore’s first week as a wide release had 615,000 album sales, there’s no clear way of delineating how many of those sales included vinyl copies; and the first-week figure in November, of 9,000 copies, represents the number purchased during that week, when many of Swift’s die-hard fans were receiving the album, though it was not tracked that way.
Nonetheless, Folklore was the first Swift album to really lean in to the vinyl-as-collectible trend, with seven alternate covers in addition to the standard black pressing available. Evermore would follow suit, with another pandemic-related delay helping its first week: The album was released in December 2020, but the vinyl came out in May 2021, allowing for five months of banked pre-orders, and with a collectible tweak: It was available in two green-colored variants and a red-colored Target exclusive, resulting in a then-record 102,000 vinyl sales in its first week of availability.
What followed was the furious slate of re-releases of her older albums, as well as her own new releases, many of which followed similar strategies — and led to truly eye-popping, record-breaking numbers. Fearless (Taylor’s Version), also with a delayed physical release, came with two vinyl versions, a gold variant and a red Target exclusive, leading to a 67,000-copy first week; Red (Taylor’s Version) followed shortly after with two versions, both of which were four-LP sets that sold for $49.99 and led to a 114,000-sale first week, re-setting her own record.
By the time Midnights rolled around a year later, Swift’s playbook was complete: multiple covers, multiple colored vinyl variants and multiple vinyl editions of each album. Midnights had four variant editions sold widely, as well as another as a Target exclusive, while each of the wide releases were also available as signed copies. The result: 575,000 LPs sold in a week. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), the following July, had three colored variants, one of which was a Target exclusive; 268,000 vinyl sales later, it also entered the pantheon. And 1989 (Taylor’s Version) completed the pre-Tortured Poets set: five color variants, one a Target exclusive with an extra bonus track, and 693,000 LPs sold in its first week.
Since the pandemic year of 2020, vinyl sales in the U.S. ballooned from $820 million to the 2023 peak of $1.35 billion in revenue. And while that’s an industry-wide trend, Swift’s strategies, and successes, have surely had plenty to do with it, too.
It’s zero shock that Taylor Swift finishes her first frame for new album The Tortured Poets Department: After all, she already boasted the decade’s two biggest debuts, for 2022’s Midnights (1.578 million equivalent album units) and 2023’s 1989 (Taylor’s Version) (1.653 million units), and has only kept getting bigger in the months since those releases. Still, the exact opening number for Poets is staggering: 2.61 million units, according to Luminate, more than any album since Adele’s 25 bowed with 3.48 million in late 2015.
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The 16-track set — which Swift expanded to 31 with its Anthology edition — also debuts all of its songs on the Billboard Hot 100, while occupying each of the chart’s top 14 slots. The Hot 100 takeover is led by the album’s leadoff cut, the Post Malone collab “Fortnight,” which becomes Swift’s 12th No. 1 on the chart. Despite all its early commercial achievements, the album’s critical reception has been more mixed to start, with many criticizing the set’s length and repetitiveness.
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How did the album achieve its eye-popping first-week numbers? And will Swift’s album releases likely get smaller or even bigger from here? Billboard staffers debate these questions and more below.
1. The final first-week number for The Tortured Poets Department is 2.6 million, easily the best number of Swift’s career and the finest single-week tally since Adele’s 25 nearly a decade ago. Is that number higher, lower or about what you expected for the TTPD debut?
Hannah Dailey: I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted that the number would be so insanely high, but I did expect that TTPD would earn Swift her biggest opening week yet. It’s well established that the pop star’s spotlight has never been brighter than in the past year, thanks to the Eras Tour, her high-profile breakups from Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy and even higher-profile romance with Travis Kelce, as well as the chart/awards success of Midnights — so it was a given that more people than ever would be tuning in.
Stephen Daw: It feels strange to say that record-breaking numbers felt “expected,” but this is Taylor Swift we’re talking about. With every subsequent release — which seem to be coming more and more frequently for the singer/songwriter — she manages to break the records that she set with her last release, so it stands to reason that Tortured Poets would manage to best her Midnights and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) sales numbers.
Kyle Denis: Around what I expected. Swift is undeniably at her commercial peak right now, and she was able to leverage the breadth of that power with gargantuan 31-song tracklist and 19 different variants of the album.
Jason Lipshutz: Much higher. Considering the expectations-shattering run that Taylor Swift is on right now, I shouldn’t be surprised that The Tortured Poets Department scored the biggest bow of the 2020s with ease… but still, 2 million is a stratosphere that not even Swift herself has approached in the past, let alone an additional 600,000 units on top of that. I mean, TTPD blew the Midnights debut out of the water — and Midnights really wasn’t that long ago? This No. 1 feat demonstrates just how much higher Swift’s superstardom has climbed recently, her music becoming a monoculture unto itself that everybody needs to check out or purchase.
Andrew Unterberger: Yeah higher. Over two million felt realistic, but I still thought it would be more of a peeking-its-head-over-two-million figure than one actually even closer to three million. It wasn’t even two years ago we were legitimately wondering whether another one-million-unit first week would happen again this decade; for Swift to come within shouting range of triple that is pretty wild.
2. What would you point to as being the biggest factor in Swift not only beating the already-historic first-week tallies of Midnights and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) with her TTPD debut, but clearing both by around a million units each?
Hannah Dailey: I think TTPD would have blown Midnights and 1989 out of the water no matter what, if nothing else because of how excited fans and haters alike were to scour the new lyrics for clues about her mystifying private life and famous love interests. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Swift’s surprise double album announcement is what sent the project over the two-million mark, inciting some listeners to purchase twice as many copies as they would have otherwise. She’s playing the numbers game, and she’s winning.
Stephen Daw: The short answer is the fact that the album was made available in more than 20 different formats certainly helped that Swift reach that astronomical figure. The much longer answer is that timing played a very key factor here. Between the ongoing Eras Tour and her extremely high-profile celebrity romance, Taylor Swift is currently dominating cultural discussions across the wide spectrum of what we consider entertainment. Fan interest in all things Taylor Swift has never been higher, and from the moment she announced Tortured Poets at the Grammys, Swifties have remained in a near-constant state of frenzy over the album’s release. To me, there was no world in which this album wouldn’t beat Midnights and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) by some ridiculous margin.
Kyle Denis: This is Swift’s first LP of all-new material since kicking off the Eras Tour. Since the record-breaking tour began – and her subsequent high-profile relationships with Matty Healy and Travis Kelce – she’s had her star grow even bigger, as impossible as that might have seemed. Her celebrity, brand and audience reach are bigger than ever – and she was already operating at pop music’s pole position before any of that.
As an album, Tortured Poets is also acutely aware of how deeply it delves into nearly two decades of Taylor Swift lore at a level that, a lot of the time, only die-hard fans understand. While the growth of her celebrity broadened her general reach, the material on Tortured Poets intensified how fans interacted with the album – whether that be countless listens on a streaming site or multiple purchases of the album’s different configurations to ensure every last song is in their possession.
Jason Lipshutz: The biggest tangible factor is probably the length of the album — more than twice as long as Midnights, which was always going to boost the TTPD streaming totals by comparison. Yet the most important factor here is intangible: Swift is just so much more enormous now than she was even 18 months ago — thanks in large part to the record-shattering Eras tour, as well as all of the success she’s achieved with her recent re-recorded albums, plus “Cruel Summer” becoming one of the biggest hits of 2023 after being released four years prior. Simply put, the numbers keep ballooning because Swift’s dominance in popular music keeps growing. Forget the track list length, vinyl production and romantic-drama intrigue; no matter how this album came out, it was likely becoming the biggest debut of Swift’s career.
Andrew Unterberger: It’s timing and planning. Any Swift album would have done massive numbers released a year after she set the new standard for contemporary pop superstardom, and the same year that she dominated both music’s biggest night and sports’ biggest night in consecutive weekends. But 31 tracks and nearly as many physical variants also helps, certainly.
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3. “Fortnight” leads the pack for Swift on the Hot 100 with its No. 1 debut, but she owns each of the 13 spots beneath it with TTPD tracks as well. Do you see “Fortnight” as a long-lasting hit from this album — and which of the other tracks do you think has the best chance of challenging it as the set’s biggest hit?
Hannah Dailey: Two years ago, I thought that “Anti-Hero” would fall from No. 1 after its first week on the chart. It ended up staying there for eight weeks. So, this time, I’m going to trust Swift’s instincts, if not my own, and say that “Fortnight” is smash hit potential and will indeed remain at the top for a while. But if another song were to give it a run for its money, it would be “Down Bad” or “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” — both of which debuted in the top 3 and have boundless opportunities for TikTok virality.
Stephen Daw: Of the songs off TTPD, “Fortnight” feels like one that will stick around for a while — Taylor and Posty sound great together, and the song’s mid-tempo, atmospheric feel brings something a little bit different to pop radio. But I feel fairly confident that “Down Bad” will end up being the breakout hit from TTPD. It’s got the pure pop sensibility of 1989, the seething pettiness of Reputation and the more laid-back sensibilities of Folklore and Evermore. A seamless blend of the things fans are looking for in a Taylor Swift hit, “Down Bad” can only go up from here.
Kyle Denis: I think “Fortnight” will stick around for a bit, but I doubt it truly follows in the footsteps of “Anti-Hero.” With “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” already going viral on TikTok, there’s hit potential there. I’d also put my money on “Down Bad” and “But Daddy I Love Him” to make something shake.
Jason Lipshutz: Maybe it won’t replace “Anti-Hero” as her longest-lasting Hot 100 No. 1 hit, but yes, “Fortnight” is positioned for a lengthy run at or near the top of the Hot 100, with strong harmonic chemistry between Swift and Post Malone and a hook that sneaks up on the listener after fully blooming in the back half of the song. It’s the most obvious single choice from TTPD to me, although I do think “Down Bad” is going to have a pronounced commercial moment — let’s get that tear-soaked gym-set music video rolling ASAP.
Andrew Unterberger: “Fortnight” sounds like a smash to me, but it will not be able to simply dominate the Hot 100 for months (or even multiple weeks) by default like it might have in years past — not with rising hits from Sabrina Carpenter, Shaboozey and Tommy Richman already nipping at its heels, and not with a world-stopping Kendrick Lamar diss record entering the fray today as well. It will need to maintain momentum at streaming while growing rapidly at radio — something it certainly has the potential to do, but which we can’t necessarily assume, even from Taylor Swift’s new single.
If it fades, I could see “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” passing it. The fact that “Heart” debuts at No. 3 on the Hot 100 despite appearing 14th in the album’s tracklist shows that fans are already isolating it as a favorite from the project in huge numbers.
4. While the commercial response to TTPD has of course been overwhelming, the critic and fan response has been a little more mixed this time around for Swift, with many citing a lack of quality control among the set’s 16 tracks (31 in the deluxe Anthology version). Do you think the mixed response will have any impact on Swift’s ever-growing superstardom, or will her unprecedented rise just continue upwards from here?
Hannah Dailey: I wouldn’t be surprised if positive public opinion about Swift ebbs a little bit after TTPD, but her superstardom will be just fine. It doesn’t matter if people are saying good or bad things about her; as long as they continue discussing her at length in any capacity, she’ll stay at the forefront of pop culture and find even more ways to use that discourse to springboard herself to previously unheard-of heights.
But, if quality control of her image as an artist – and not just a celebrity — is important to her, then she may want to take criticisms about quality control in her music seriously. TTPD is very good. But just imagine what she could make alongside a few new collaborators with fresh perspectives and a less heavy-handed approach, one that forces her to leave room only for her bestest ideas.
Stephen Daw: How does one stop a runaway train? Especially with the way that some of Swift’s fans have been mercilessly going after music critics for doing their jobs over the last two weeks, I think it’s fair to say that her stardom isn’t cooling down any time soon. With a two more re-recordings still due to come from Taylor, as well as the European dates of her Eras Tour, Taylor is not in any danger of losing relevance for the foreseeable future.
Kyle Denis: Everyone and everything hits a ceiling, and Swift might be approaching hers. I think the mixed response can be easily mitigated by a new re-recording – the circumstances are certainly starting to align for Reputation (Taylor’s Version) — or a new album with more quality control and a new sound. Nonetheless, I do think the mixed reactions are slightly indicative of Taylor fatigue across the board. The Swifties will always be there, but I can see a scenario in which casual listeners feel less inclined to check in post-Tortured Poets.
Jason Lipshutz: Following a little more than a week of discourse, it’s even more clear to me that TTPD is going to function like the 2020s version of Reputation — mainstream listeners will continue to be polarized, but Swift diehards will wrap their arms around it as an idiosyncratic opus that captures their favorite superstar’s psyche, messy sprawl of the track list and all. In the same way that Reputation didn’t slow down Swift’s commercial enormity one bit, TTPD is a behemoth that also feels like a personalized note to the most attentive fans, a combination that will keep Swift growing ever still.
Andrew Unterberger: I think it’s not so much about the quality of TTPD and its dozens of tracks as it as about the sheer amount of Swift we’ve been inundated with the past four years — not just in the pop-culture ubiquity sense, but in the mind-boggling volume of new tracks she’s released over that time. A little time and distance will be kinder to a lot of these songs, and certainly it’s not like folks are gonna be likely to brush off new Swift music anytime soon, but it still might be a good idea for her to chill on the new releases (or at least downscale ’em a little bit) for the next couple years or so.
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5. Adele’s 25 moved 3.48 units in its first week — a still mind-boggling number that many of us thought would never even be approached again. Swift has gotten closer than many would have expected, but she still has a decent gap to make up. What percentage chance would you give her of passing Adele’s seemingly unreachable first week at some point in her career?
Hannah Dailey: We’ve all learned not to underestimate Taylor Swift, but at the same time, I feel like TTPD would’ve been the album to surpass 25 if Swift had it in her. So for now, I’ll give her 50%. You never know, especially with her.
Stephen Daw: I’m going to be conservative and say it’s a 50/50 tossup. If anyone is going to manage to beat Adele, it will be Taylor Swift — but if the immediate, ridiculous sales numbers of TTPD aren’t able to stack up to 25, then it’s hard to imagine a future Taylor Swift album that could.
Kyle Denis: Above 50%. Taylor’s a consistent seller and smart businesswoman, it’s really all about timing with her. It’s possible that, with a longer pre-order window and Scorpion-esque playlist takeovers, Tortured Poets could have come closer to 25’s numbers. That said, something tells me that if she was ever going to pass 3.48 million units in the first week, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) and Tortured Poets were her best bets.
Jason Lipshutz: 3%. Never say never, but that number just looks too far out of reach for modern music consumption. At the very least, that number gives Swift something to aim for when the TTPD follow-up arrives.
Andrew Unterberger: Maybe 25%. This does feel like it was her best shot, but Swift didn’t get to where she is by accepting “close but not quite,” so I imagine she’ll continue trying for it. 2.6 million isn’t a world removed from 3.5 million, though it’s still far enough that it’s not a gap to be bridged with a couple more vinyl variants or another bonus disc of leftover cuts. I don’t know how she might do it, but I do know that I wouldn’t feel comfortable betting against her doing so.
Florence Welch is looking back on working alongside Taylor Swift.
The Florence + the Machine leader and Swift co-wrote the song “Florida!!!,” which appears on the pop superstar’s new double album, The Tortured Poets Department. In an interview with British Vogue, published Thursday (April 25), Welch reflects on her collaboration with Swift.
“I almost didn’t think of the scale of it,” Welch told the publication. “There’s the sort of bigness of [Taylor Swift the phenomenon], and then there’s the Taylor I spend time with in the studio, who is just the sweetest and most down to earth.”
The Florence + the Machine singer said that Swift came to her with “a concept and a story” for the song, which is “my favorite way to start songwriting.” She added, “We had such a fun time. And then when it came out I was like, ‘Oh, s—!’”
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Swift previously explained the narrative that inspired “Florida!!!” during an interview with iHeartRadio.
“‘Florida!!!’ is a song I wrote with Florence and the Machine, and I think I was coming up with this idea of like, what happens when your life doesn’t fit, or your choices you’ve made catch up to you,” Swift said.
She added that she’s a fan of Dateline and noticed how “people have these crimes that they commit, where do they immediately skip town and go to? They go to Florida.”
The Tortured Poets Department is Swift’s eleventh studio album and her her first release of new music since 2022’s Grammy-winning Midnights. The 31-track double album also features a collaboration with Post Malone, as well as writing and production contributions from Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.
Although The Tortured Poets Department is Swift’s first album of new music since Midnights, she has steadily pumped out her re-recorded Taylor’s Version albums in the interim. In between the two aforementioned albums, Swift topped the Billboard 200 with both Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version), the latter of which became the star’s record-extending sixth album to debut with over one million pure sales in its first week.
Taylor Swift‘s The Tortured Poets Department has topped this week’s new music poll.
Music fans voted in a poll published Friday (April 19) on Billboard, choosing the pop superstar’s new double album as their favorite new music release of the past week.
The Tortured Poets Department brought in nearly 75% of the vote, beating out new music by DJ Snake featuring Peso Pluma (“Teka”); Nicki Minaj featuring Travis Scott, Chris Brown and Sexyy Red (“FTCU (Remix)”); Pearl Jam (Dark Matter); and Cloud Nothings (Final Summer).
The Tortured Poets Department is Swift’s eleventh studio album and her her first release of new music since 2022’s Grammy-winning Midnights. The 31-track double album features collaborations with Florence + the Machine and Post Malone, as well as writing and production contributions from Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.
On Instagram, Swift described the project as “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.”
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Although The Tortured Poets Department is Swift’s first album of new music since Midnights, she has steadily pumped out her re-recorded Taylor’s Version albums in the interim. In between the two aforementioned albums, Swift topped the Billboard 200 with both Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version), the latter of which became the star’s record-extending sixth album to debut with over one million pure sales in its first week.
The Tortured Poets Department is already off to a stellar start in the U.S. Upon its first day of release on Friday (April 19), the set sold 1.4 million copies in traditional album sales, according to initial reports to data tracking firm Luminate. That marks Swift’s biggest sales week ever for any album in the U.S.
The Tortured Poets Department had also broken numerous Spotify records at press time, including becoming the first album in the streaming service’s history to have more than 300 million streams in a single day. The set’s first single, “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone, also became Spotify’s most streamed song in a single day.
Trailing behind The Tortured Poets Department on the poll is DJ Snake and Peso Pluma’s dance floor hit “Teka,” which dropped just in time for Peso’s performance at Coachella weekend two. The team-up brought in 10% of the vote.
See the final results of this week’s new music release poll below.
Swifties might need at least a fortnight to recover from Taylor Swift‘s new YouTube Shorts video. On Friday night (April 19), after the premiere of her “Fortnight” music video from her just-released Tortured Poets Department album, Swift took to the video-sharing platform to encourage fans to share their “fortnight recap” with the hashtag #ForAFortnightChallenge. A […]
Jake Shane, who has nearly 3 million followers on TikTok thanks to his viral comedy videos under the handle @octopusslover8, is reviewing albums for Billboard with exclusive new essays and videos. Find his latest Billboard album review below, for Taylor Swift’s just-released The Tortured Poets Department album.
Taylor Swift, known for her vulnerability, has never been so vulnerable.
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First thing Friday (April 19), Swift welcomed us into The Tortured Poets Department, her earth-shattering 11th studio album. Except, upon arrival, listeners discovered it was more a graveyard than a classroom. The air is cold and filled with tension from ghosts of relationships past — each step inviting the listener closer and closer into stories frozen in time. The end result is an album that feels like pages ripped from Swift’s diary loosely scattered across a frosty gravesite — each tomb sharing its own story of grief, loss and, in some instances, love.
Tortured Poets is undoubtably Swift’s most personal album to date — which, for Swift is a hard feat to beat. Through classic Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner production, Swift’s pen floats on lyrics sharp to the touch. This is especially true on the Dessner-produced track 5, “So Long, London.” In it, Swift says goodbye to a relationship she gave everything for, but received no ROI. “My spine split from carrying us up the hill,” Swift proclaims; this is Swift at her very best, painting a photo of heartbreak so vivid that it almost feels like our bones are breaking too. Close listeners will notice the beginning of the track sounds similar to Swift’s love song “Call It What You Want” off her sixth studio album Reputation. Perhaps the most cutting lyrics, though, on “So Long, London” come in the second verse, when Swift admits her regret for holding on to the “sinking ship” that the relationship was: “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”
One of Swift’s defining talents is how she builds a cohesive narrative throughout her albums, and here, that ability has never been more on display. On Tortured Poets, Swift walks the listener through a barren graveyard filled with withered bones and torn memories, only to finally reach sunlight — on the final two tracks of the album (not including the extra 15 songs that dropped at 2 a.m. ET), Swift has once again found love. On “The Alchemy,” Swift sings of a love so undeniable, she is returning to her old, pre-tortured ways: “I haven’t come around in so long. But I’m making a comeback to where I belong.”
As always, Swift’s lyricism shines bright (arguably brighter than ever before). This is notable on the absolutely devastating “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” where Swift looks in the rearview of a past relationship with more questions than answers. “You hung me on your wall. Stabbed me with your push pins. In public, showed me off. Then sank in stoned oblivion.” Swift’s pen is pointed, but, then again, when is it not? She doesn’t want to talk to said “man,” but she wants a message delivered: “You didn’t measure up in any measure of a man.”
On “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” Swift is at her most bare, detailing the heartbreak-turned -depression she faced while performing the biggest tour of her career (and perhaps of all time). “She’s having the time of her life there in her glittering prime. The lights refract sequin stars off her silhouette every night. I can show you lies,” Swift croons over a synth beat. Swift calls back to folklore’s “mirrorball” by proving once again that she can be anything we want her to be, even if it’s not true. It is one of the first times Swift has broken the third wall since the start of the record-breaking tour, and it is almost reassuring to listeners and fans alike. Taylor is human, too, even when her stardom questions the laws of physics.
One of the greatest tales Swift tells is that of heartbreak to healing; she did it on Reputation, and on Tortured Poets she has done it once more — this time, though, with more maturity and the clarity only age can bring. At the end of the album, Swift has once again found love and forgiven heartbreak. It might not be her true love, but she’s happy — oh, and she’s Taylor Swift. Who can argue with that?
You can find Shane’s review of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter here.
In case you’ve always wondered what Taylor Swift would look like with Post Malone‘s face tattoos, “Fortnight” is the video for you. On Friday night (April 19), Swift unveiled the video for “Fortnight,” featuring Malone. It’s the first visual from her brand-new 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, and it goes alongside the project’s […]
The Tortured Poets Department has quite the staff! Taylor Swift released her highly anticipated new double album on Friday (April 19), and across the LP’s 31 tracks lies a slew of references to celebrities inside and outside the worlds of music and poetry. When the “Cruel Summer” singer first revealed the Tortured Poets tracklist in […]
04/19/2024
See how we broke down every track from Taylor Swift’s latest opus.
04/19/2024
Taylor Swift is counting down the days until the release of her new album. On Saturday (April 6), the 34-year-old pop superstar used her lucky number to remind Swifties that there are only 13 days left until the arrival of her highly anticipated album, The Tortured Poets Department. The “Cruel Summer” singer took to her […]
