On February 4, 2024, Taylor Swift won her 13th Grammy, and when she went up on the stage, she gave a completely unexpected announcement. Her next album, which everyone was expecting to be Reputation Taylor’s Version, turned out to be a completely new one named “The Tortured Poets Department”.
Understandably, those who have been keeping up with the clues that Taylor Swift tends to leave before dropping a new album were pretty shocked. What everyone believed to be leading to Reputation TV actually turned out to be a distraction from this new album.
There were many different reasons that the Swifties believed that Reputation TV would drop. One of the most obvious ones was the change in color scheme that Taylor made to her social media profiles.
“We all expected Reputation Taylor’s Version because of the fact she changed her profile picture to be black and white earlier that morning,” sophomore Symphony Forbus said.
All of Taylor’s friends on social media also had their profile pictures changed to grayscale weeks before the announcement, and on the day of the Grammys, she changed her own profile picture to grayscale as well. Also, just about everyone who attended the Grammys was wearing black and white. Many believed that the grayscale was a hint to represent Taylor going back into her Reputation era, as the album cover and theme of Reputation is in grayscale, but it turned out to also be very close to the color scheme for her new album that hadn’t been announced yet.
If someone were to pay enough attention to the clues, though, they would realize that the Swifties weren’t left completely out of the loop on what was going on. On the same day as her announcement, Taylor’s official website where people can buy her merchandise crashed for about an hour, and the error message that showed had the numbers three, two and one beside it. Many were theorizing that this was another hint at Reputation, since it’s her sixth album, and all of the numbers added together make six. At the bottom of the message, though, there were a bunch of seemingly random letters that read “hneriergrd”. If those letters are rearranged, they spell out “red herring”. A red herring refers to a distraction that takes the audience’s eyes away from what’s really important, which is basically what Taylor was doing with us. She gave us all of these hints to something else, so that we wouldn’t be paying attention to what was actually happening.
Now that it has been officially announced, we can analyze and make predictions about this new album. One of the most interesting things about it is the title. This is the longest album title that Taylor has ever written, the second longest being Speak Now, so it’s definitely a lot different from what she usually gives us. The name “The Tortured Poets Department” most likely refers to how the process of becoming a successful poet can be painful, even torturous. Taylor Swift is arguably the most prominent poet of our time. She takes her pain and experiences, and she turns them into lyrics to be heard worldwide.
Then there’s the tracklist, which consists of songs “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”, and a bonus track called, “The Manuscript.”
Many Swifties are already making predictions about the album and which songs they think will be their favorites months before the release date. The album is to be released on April 19, 2024.
“I expect this album to be very deep and different from her other albums,” senior Lizett Garcia said, “I’m really looking forward to listening to ‘Fortnight’ because it sounds interesting, and it features Post Malone. I also have a feeling that I’m going to like ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.’