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The Tortured Poets Department is the eleventh studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on April 19, 2024, through Republic Records. A surprise double album edition, subtitled The Anthology, containing a second volume of songs was released the same day. Swift began writing The Tortured Poets Department shortly after finishing her tenth studio album, Midnights (2022), and continued during the Eras Tour in 2023. She described The Tortured Poets Department as her "lifeline" album, conceiving it as an imperative songwriting project amidst her heightened fame and media scrutiny. The songs introspect on her public and private lives, detailing tumult and sorrow via motifs of self-awareness, delusion, anger, mourning, and humor. Produced with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the album is a minimalist synth-pop, chamber pop, and folk-pop effort with rock and country stylings. The composition is largely mid-tempo, driven by synthesizers and drum machines alongside piano and guitar. The album broke various sales and streaming records. It achieved the highest single-day and single-week global streams for an album on Spotify and topped the charts in territories across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas, breaking chart records in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In the United States, The Tortured Poets Department debuted atop the Billboard 200 with first-week 2.6 million album-equivalent units, including 1.9 million pure sales, marking Swift's biggest sales week and record-extending seventh release to open with over a million units. Its songs made Swift the first artist to monopolize the first 14 positions of the Billboard Hot 100, with the lead single "Fortnight" at the top. The album polarized critics upon release: most reviews were positive and praised Swift's cathartic songwriting for its emotional resonance and wit, but some found it overlong and lacking profundity. Journalists attributed the mixed reception to Swift's celebrity, which was used by some reviews to prioritize gossip and sensationalism over artistic evaluation; some subsequent assessments appreciated the musical and lyrical nuances that emerged upon further listens. Swift included songs from the album in the 2024 phase of the Eras Tour, revamping the original setlist. Background and conception Swift released her tenth studio album, Midnights, on October 21, 2022, to widespread commercial and critical success. In 2023, she released two re-recorded albums, Speak Now (Taylor's Version) and 1989 (Taylor's Version), as part of her re-recording project. On February 4, 2024, the day of the 66th Annual Grammy Awards where Midnights had been nominated, Swift teased the release of a new album by changing the profile pictures across her social media accounts to black-and-white. Fans speculated online that she was preparing to release Reputation (Taylor's Version), a forthcoming re-recording of her sixth studio album, Reputation (2017). Swift's website also appeared as if it had malfunctioned, reporting an unusual non-standard HTTP status code 321, as well as error code "hneriergrd", which fans deciphered to be an anagram spelling "red herring." The source code of the website contained non-English words. On February 4, 2024, Swift won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album and Album of the Year for Midnights; in her acceptance speech for the former, she announced a new studio album that she had worked on since 2022, titled The Tortured Poets Department, set for release on April 19, 2024. The album cover artwork was posted to her social media accounts, along with a photograph of a handwritten note, which incorporated English translations of the words from the source code: And so I enter into evidence / My tarnished coat of arms / My muses, acquired like bruises / My talismans and charms / The tick, tick, tick of love bombs / My veins of pitch black ink / All's fair in love and poetry...Sincerely, The Chairman of the Tortured Poets Department.Swift characterized The Tortured Poets Department as a "lifeline" album—one that she "really needed" to make. She began conceiving the album immediately after submitting Midnights to her record label, Republic Records, and continued working on it in secret throughout the U.S. leg of the Eras Tour in 2023. While she was creating the album, her dating life continued to be a widely covered topic in the press, who reported on Swift in association with the actor Joe Alwyn, the singer Matty Healy, and the football player Travis Kelce. According to Swift, creating the album proved to her the integral role of songwriting in her life. She stated, "I have never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets." In an Instagram post announcing the album's release, Swift further characterized the album as "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." Composition Themes and lyrics The Tortured Poets Department consists of 16 standard songs and features two guest acts—the American rapper Post Malone on the lead single "Fortnight" and the English indie rock band Florence and the Machine, led by the singer-songwriter Florence Welch, on the song "Florida!!!". The album was primarily written and produced by Swift with longtime collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner; Welch and Malone also co-wrote their respective collaborations with Swift. The album is rooted in personal songwriting, exploring Swift's introspections on the events in her private and public lives. She was inspired by her tumultuous relationships and the public perception of her celebrity to create lyrical narratives that were messy, unbridled, and unguarded, containing meta-references to her personal life through allusions and name-dropping. Heartbreak is the primary topic, expressed via varied themes such as delusion, anger, mourning, and death. While the lyrics evoke vulnerable and devastating sentiments, they also incorporate humor and hyperbole. Critics found them either self-aware or self-conscious. Swift considered the album a cathartic exercise and described the content as "fatalistic" with overarching themes of "longing, pining, lost dreams". Critics characterized The Tortured Poets Department as a post-breakup album. Ann Powers wrote in NPR that throughout the record, "Swift is trying to work out how emotional violence occurs." In The Conversation, the music professor Samuel Murray opined that the album uses melodrama as a narrative device to "celebrate emotional vulnerability as she shares her innermost thoughts". Business Insider's Callie Ahlgrim described the album's content as Swift's "messiest, horniest, and funniest". In The Independent, Helen Brown suggested that Swift's songwriting draws on her country music roots to explore detail-heavy narratives. While some critics argued that the album is.... Discover the Ellie Gibson Helen Thorn popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Ellie Gibson Helen Thorn books.