Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, was released Friday, April 19th along with its double album, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, two hours later, and its songs leave a lot for fans to unpack.
This album was announced by Swift at the 2024 Grammy awards while she was accepting the award for Pop Album of the Year for her 2022 album, Midnights. Since the announcement, fans have been speculating about the topic of this new album. The general consensus was that many of the songs would be about Swift’s former relationship with actor Joe Alwyn that ended in April of last year after 6 years of dating. Fans were also hoping some songs would be about her new relationship with Travis Kelce, the tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. The track list for the original Tortured Poets album was released via Instagram on February 5th, revealing collaborations with artists Post Malone and Florence and the Machine. Fans were shocked by some of the titles like “I Can Fix Him (No I Really Can)” and “So Long, London”, believing that these songs were about Alwyn. Taylor Swift shocked fans by releasing another album after the release of Tortured Poets by releasing a second album two hours later with 15 additional tracks on top of the 16 from the first release.
After my first listen, I can confirm that there is a lot to unpack in this album. The sound is a mix of synth pop and acoustic elements. I think that most of the songs are, in fact, about her relationship with Joe because she makes references to London which is where Joe is from and talks a lot about feeling trapped which is something we’ve heard in songs about Joe before. She does not paint their relationship in a very positive light with lines like “the coward claimed he was a lion” from “loml” and “you didn’t measure up in any measure of a man” from “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”. I also think there are a few songs about Travis Kelce on this album too because she calls herself “the girl of his American dreams” in “ Fresh Out The Slammer” and the numerous football references in “The Alchemy”. After only listening to the album once, I think my favorite songs so far are “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, “The Tortured Poets Department”, and “loml”. Overall, I really liked this album, and I’m excited to listen to it again to see if my opinion changes at all.
The first single on The Tortured Poets Department is “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone, which will have a music video released at 5PM PST on April 19th. Swift’s next steps are to restart her historic Eras Tour in Paris, France on May 9th.
