Taylor Swift’s latest surprise double album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” sparks reactions from fans and critics
The Tortured Poets Department just dropped and it’s already causing a divide among Taylor Swift fans. Some jumped on it early after it leaked online, while others stayed loyal and refused to listen until the official release.
Taylor’s 11th album came out on Friday, but all 16 tracks and lyrics were popping up on social media as early as Wednesday. Some die-hard fans, known as Swifties, avoided the leaked album, insisting that true fans would wait for the official release. Meanwhile, others even shared fake links to deter people from finding and listening to it.
“Raise your hand if you’re a REAL Taylor Swift fan and haven’t listened,” one social media user posted.
“People need to understand it’s not just about being a fan. It’s about respecting all the hard work!” wrote another. “She and her team put so much effort into this album release, so let’s not disrespect that.”
Before this, Taylor’s previous album, Midnights, also leaked before its drop date, but it didn’t seem to hurt her sales: the album sold 1.6 million copies in its first week in the US alone. On Thursday, Spotify announced that The Tortured Poets Department had broken the record for the most pre-saved album on its platform.
Then, at 2 a.m. EST on Friday, Taylor surprised everyone by releasing a second half of the album with 15 additional songs: “The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album,” she wrote. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second instalment of TTPD: The Anthology … And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”
On Friday, social media was buzzing with videos from listening parties around the world and screenshots of receipts after a wide range of Tortured Poet merchandise dropped online. Fans were even dissecting frame by frame a 10-second preview for a new music video.
As with all of Taylor’s releases, The Tortured Poets Department was highly anticipated, despite coming just 18 months after her last album, Midnights (2022), and six months after 1989 (Taylor’s Version). The album features appearances from US rapper Post Malone on the lead single “Fortnight” and Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine. Physical copies of the album include an original poem from Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks.
Critics were mostly positive: Variety called it “audacious” and “transfixing” and “the Taylor Swift-est Taylor Swift record ever,” while Rolling Stone described it as “wildly ambitious and gloriously chaotic.” However, NME critiqued the album for containing “some of her most cringe-inducing lines yet” and noted that it “lacks the genuinely interesting shifts that have punctuated Swift’s career so far.”
Early fan reactions were mostly positive, with some appreciating the return of the synth sound she experimented with on Midnights. However, some Swifties were disappointed by the absence of references to her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, especially given the clear mentions of her next ex, the 1975 frontman Matt Healy. One lyric in the title track likened Healy to a “tattooed golden retriever,” which sparked some mockery.
“All that for an album about Matty Healy,” one fan wrote on her Instagram, a comment that received thousands of likes.
Lyrics on the album also touch on her conflicted feelings about fame and her time performing on the ongoing Eras tour, which has broken records to become the biggest tour staged to date. On the new track I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, she describes performing to millions and ends with: “I’m so miserable! And nobody even knows!”
In describing the album, Taylor called it “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,” she continued. “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.”
