All we know about Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets Department'

Taylor Swift wearing a strapless white gown and holding a Grammy in one black-gloved hand while gesturing with the other

April 18, 2024 3 AM PT

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).

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.

What promotional activity has gone on?

A gray and brown outdoor structure resembling a bookcase with the words "The Tortured Poets Department" near the top

After the initial announcement at the Grammys, Swift was relatively quiet. In recent weeks, though, she’s gone back to her internet-breaking behavior.

It started with an Apple Music collaboration that saw Swift releasing five different playlists on the platform, each consisting of songs from her catalog and representing one of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The playlists were titled with track names and lyrics from “The Tortured Poets Department.”

Then, on Saturday, Apple Music marked the final countdown to the album with a digital scavenger hunt.

“A word a day til the @taylorswift13 album drops,” the music service wrote in its bio on X (formerly Twitter).

Soon after, fans discovered that the secret words were hidden within song lyrics on Apple Music. Thus far, they’ve parsed the words “hereby,” “conduct,” “this,” “post” and “we,” and while many have their theories, the meaning of the incomplete word jumble is still unknown.

The festivities have also moved offline, to Spotify’s “The Tortured Poets Department” library installation at the Grove in L.A., which debuted Tuesday and is open through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

“Fans will be able to explore a poetry library, highly curated to represent the new record,” the event description on the Grove’s website reads. “The shelves will be packed with books and visual surprises for fans to enjoy.”

Visitors also seem to be finding a number of Swift’s trademark Easter eggs throughout the installation, including an upside-down “So Long, London” title — which fans suspect is a nod to her year-ago breakup with British actor Joe Alwyn — and a clock set to 2.

The former visual also appeared in a video Swift posted Tuesday on Instagram. Captioned “The TTPD Timetable,” the cryptic clip guides viewers from a “Midnights”-style room into “The Tortured Poets Department,” where a wall calendar teases a Friday music video release.

How can I listen to the new album?

“The Tortured Poets Department” is available to pre-order (and pre-save on Spotify or Apple Music) on Swift’s website, and is currently being offered in vinyl, cassette, CD and digital album formats to be released April 19. It will also start streaming on that date — which for West Coasters means at 9 p.m. Pacific Thursday.

The four versions of the album are also available to pre-order on Swift’s website, but CD and vinyl versions of the album are also available at Target. Currently, there is no version of the album, digital or physical, that will contain all four bonus tracks.