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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, by Republic Records. A double album edition, containing a surprise second volume of songs and subtitled The Anthology, 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, conceived amidst intense media scrutiny on her personal life and heightened fame brought by touring. The songs explore her self-awareness and introspections on those events, characterized by hyperbolic yet humorous lyrics detailing themes of sorrow, fatalism, and melodrama. 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 melody 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 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. 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 and introspective songwriting, exploring Swift's retrospective emotions of a line of events in her private and public lives. Some critics commented that she was inspired by her tumultuous relationships to create lyrical narratives that were messy, unbridled, and unguarded, containing meta-references to her personal life through allusions and name-dropping. According to The Economic Times, the album "predominantly explores the unpredictable nature of love, questioning the madness of anchoring our existence to a sentiment that can vanish in an instant." Whereas, The Conversation described the album's lyrics as "a euphoric rejection of societal expectations". Swift, speaking to the audience at a Melbourne show of the Eras Tour, described the album as her most cathartic project yet; the track "I Can Do It with a Broken Heart" details how she was undergoing an emotional breakdown while going on tour. Ann Powers wrote in NPR that throughout the album, "Swift is trying to work out how emotional violence occurs." Highlighting the excessive media coverage on Swift's heightened fame and turbulent personal life, Vulture's Craig Jenkins opined that the album finds her "more interested in redrawing boundaries", with songs like "The Tortured Poets Department" and "But Daddy I Love Him" addressing the scrutiny on her past relationships. Delusion, heartbreak and feeling imprisoned are the primary topics of the album, expressed via themes of anger, mourning, death, and humor. A number of critics felt that Swift's self-awar.... Discover the Toy Taylor popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Toy Taylor books.