Taylor Swift surprises fans with double album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

Taylor Swift surprised fans with her new record The Tortured Poets Department on Friday, revealing it was a double album featuring songs about heartbreak and a period described as “the saddest story” of the singer’s life.

Swift’s 11th studio album, featuring 16 tracks, was officially released at midnight, but two hours later she revealed a second instalment with an extra 15 songs.

“I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you,” Swift wrote on Instagram.

Poets comes 18 months after 2022’s Midnights. Swift will also release a video for the new album’s first single, a collaboration with Post Malone called Fortnight, on Friday.

The 34-year-old has been crossing music industry milestones and boosting local economies with her record-breaking Eras Tour, which resumes in Paris in May.

Time magazine named Swift its 2023 Person of the Year, citing her musical accomplishments and influence on everything from pop culture to voter registration.

A description of Poets in a separate Instagram post said it was “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,” it added.

“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.”

The Instagram post did not say which events Swift was referring to. Fans have speculated she was writing about her relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn. The pair split in April 2023 after six years of dating.

A representative for Alwyn could not immediately be reached for comment.

Reviews were mostly positive, with Rolling Stone calling the music “wildly ambitious and gloriously chaotic,” but others were not as impressed. Britain’s NME described it as “surprisingly flat and, at times, cringeworthy.”

Maria Sherman with The Associated Press says the album “feels like a bloodletting: A cathartic purge after a major heartbreak delivered through an ascendant vocal run, an elegiac verse, or mobile, synthesized productions that underscore the powers of Swift’s storytelling.”