It’s the dawn of a new era — a new Taylor Swift Era, that is.
This week, the 14-time Grammy Award-winning artist will release her 11th studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” which she first announced at the Grammys in February.
While accepting the pop vocal album award for “Midnights” — her first of two wins that night — Swift thanked her fans by divulging “a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years, which is that my brand new album comes out April 19.”
The announcement came as a shock to Swifties, who had theorized that the singer would instead announce “Reputation (Taylor’s Version)” at the awards ceremony. (That the albums seem to share a B&W aesthetic didn’t help).
what genre is the tortured poets department
And while she may have intentionally thrown fans off the scent, “All’s fair in love and poetry.” So here’s what we know so far:
When does ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ come out?
Following a whirlwind promotional week, “The Tortured Poets Department” will arrive at 9 p.m. Pacific on Thursday. Her “April 19” announcement in February was referring to the album’s East Coast ETA.
Swift began making the album directly after she turned in “Midnights,” and it took her about two years to complete, she said during her first Eras Tour show in Japan on Feb. 7.
“I kept working on it throughout the U.S. tour, and when it was perfect — in my opinion when it’s good enough for you — I finished it and I am so, so excited that soon you’ll get to hear it,” she told the crowd.
What genre is it?
In Target’s product description for “The Tortured Poets Department” vinyl, the album is classified as pop, but the singer herself has not indicated where the album lands with respect to genre.
Instead, the self-proclaimed “chairman of the Tortured Poets Department” has released successive batches of lyrics, including “Crowd goes wild at her fingertips / Half moonshine, / full eclipse” — posted on the day of the April 8 solar eclipse.
Still, clues about the album’s potential sonic characteristics may lie with two of its credited songwriters, Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, who have each produced large swaths of Swift’s discography.
If the two producers’ generally dissimilar sounds — Dessner leans pastoral, and Antonoff, synthetic — both inflect the record, it could be anything from folk to indie pop.
How many songs? Any guest artists?
Swift revealed the track list for “The Tortured Poets Department” in a Feb. 5 Instagram post, listing the following 16 titles:
- “Fortnight” (feat. Post Malone)
- “The Tortured Poets Department”
- “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”
- “Down Bad”
- “So Long, London”
- “But Daddy I Love Him”
- “Fresh Out the Slammer”
- “Florida!!!!” (feat. Florence + The Machine)
- “Guilty as Sin?”
- “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”
- “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”
- “loml”
- “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”
- “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”
- “The Alchemy”
- “Clara Bow”
Additionally, there are four different confirmed editions of the album, each named after the bonus track it will include: “The Bolter,” “The Albatross,” “The Black Dog” and “The Manuscript.”
Post Malone and Florence and the Machine are also credited as songwriters on their respective tracks.