Answering 13 Important Questions Ahead of Taylor Swift’s New Album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

Swift has spent the past year touring, re-releasing her old music, and starting a new high-profile relationship. Now comes her 11th studio album. What should we expect from Swift’s latest breakup album?

Two months ago, Taylor Swift surprise-announced the impending release of her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, while on stage at the Grammys. At midnight on Friday, the first department meeting will commence (or will it be hereby conducted?). Tortured Poets will be the latest release in a spring full of new pop albums and another tentpole event in the world-conquering stretch of Swift’s career that’s currently unfolding. Tortured Poets is also expected to be a breakup record from an artist who has mastered that form–but who hasn’t written one in a while. Swift is seemingly everywhere these days (Coachella! The Bahamas! Chicago?!) but she has not released a single or gone into much detail about the album, which of course means that plenty of mystery, Easter-egging, and, um, strong-opinion-having has filled in the gaps. So before we officially enter the Tortured Poets era, let’s discuss all we know. I’ll answer as many of the questions that I can below and ask the ones that remain. Let’s do 13 of them; it just feels right.

Let’s start with the basics. Say I have an aversion to word puzzles and anything written in old-timey typewriter font and therefore know nothing about this album. I thought Taylor Swift was on tour and re-recording her old stuff. When did she have time to record new music?

Sorry about your typewriter thing! But good question: The timeline here does matter. Swift announced TTPD in February at the Grammys and, at an Eras Tour show not long after, shared that she started work on the album just after she finished recording Midnights, which was released in October 2022. That means this album has been in the works since well before Swift’s latest re-release, 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Some other basic facts about TTPD: It’s 16 tracks long, with four bonus tracks on various vinyl editions. Swift worked mainly with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, her two main collaborators since Folklore. Aesthetically, it’s giving sultry academia. Also, there will be a music video!

Why is it called The Tortured Poets Department?

I was hoping to avoid this for longer, but allons-y, I suppose. The album title seems to be a reference to “The Tortured Man Club,” which is the name of a group chat between the actors Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott, and Joe Alwyn, the existence of which Alwyn entered into the record in a 2022 interview with the British GQ. The chat referred to Mescal and Alwyn’s roles in Sally Rooney adaptations which, fine, OK, whatever. Where Swift comes in, of course, is that Swift and Alwyn dated for six years before splitting last spring—right around the time Swift was getting into working on the album.

Oh boy. OK. So Joe was a tortured man, and Swift is a tortured poet?

I think? However, I must tell you that there’s some grammatical gray area here that makes the organizational chart of the Tortured Poets Department a little hard to decipher. Taylor has referred to herself as the Chairman, but because there is no apostrophe in “poets,” she’s using it as a non-possessive plural noun. That implies that the department is about tortured poets, not necessarily run by them. Also, the department might be an asylum of some kind?

Whew. So this really is a full-on breakup album?

All signs point to yes. Talking about TTPD on stage at an Eras Tour show in Australia in February, Swift said that making the album was a “lifeline” during a particularly rough time. “It sort of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through life, and I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets,” she said.

Then there were the playlists. Last week, Swift curated a series of five playlists for Apple Music based on the five stages of grief. Each one was made up of songs from her catalog. Included were a handful of Swift’s old love songs which seemed to take on new meaning within the contexts of playlists about “denial,” “anger,” or “bargaining.” The song “Lover,” for instance, a waltz written in the style of a first dance at a wedding, was on the denial playlist. “This is a list of songs about getting so caught up in the idea of something that you have a hard time seeing the red flags,” Swift said in a voice note introducing the playlist.

So, yeah, it’s a breakup album.

It’s worth stopping for a moment to consider what all that means–that the breakup songwriter of this century is releasing a true heartbreak record for the first time in a decade. The last time she did this, she wrote “All Too Well.”

“All Too Well,” wow, great song. I seem to recall the guy from that song not loving the attention from it, though? Is all really fair, as Swift wrote on Instagram when she announced the album, in love and poetry?

For someone asking for a primer on a Taylor Swift album, you seem awfully familiar with her online presence??

I have a strong impulse to answer this question with two words—who cares—not out of indifference to the fact that having the internet’s most intense stan army turned on you has real consequences, but as an acknowledgement that good work is true work and that Swift has always been at her sharpest when she is not pulling any punches. This is the woman who wrote “Style,” and “Dear John,” and built an intro the exact length of one Joe Jonas breakup phone call into “Last Kiss.” I mean no harm, but I do want that creative force at the wheel.

But how Swift will be heard if and when she goes back to naming names does feel like one of the central questions surrounding TTPD, in part because it has been a while since Swift released any of those earlier songs. It’s not as though she hasn’t written about heartbreak on her more recent albums, the last five of which came out while she and Alwyn were together, but she’s trended more lyrically opaque in some cases, and in others, she described songs as character studies rather than autobiographical.

It seems, though, that she’s getting back to specificity. TTPD’s Track 5, a slot typically reserved for one of the more heartbreaking songs on any Swift album, is called “So Long, London.” Other track titles like “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” add to the sense that there is a He in the middle of the story Swift is telling, that He did something bad and that we’re about to find out what that was.

Perhaps this is to be expected. It’s been a while since Swift’s last explicitly autobiographical breakup album, but it’s also been a while since her last significant breakup! (We will not be discussing Matty Healy here, though I’m holding space within “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”) If you don’t want her at her “London Boy,” you don’t deserve her at her “So Long, London,” etc., etc. And Swift was plenty specific on “You’re Losing Me,” the one song from the Midnights recording sessions that didn’t make it on that album but was eventually released after the breakup. I don’t remember what the various statements to People or Page Six said about the split, but I sure remember the lyric I wouldn’t marry me either.

I am going to exercise my right to say that, short of adding to a pile-on, whether this album release is a positive experience for Joe Alywn, an adult man I do not know, does not feel like my concern. What’s closer to my interest as a fan and as someone who’s fascinated by how Swift moves through the world is what it means, right now, for her to use her platform to say: someone hurt me.

Swift has always been a lover and a fighter. There was a throwaway comment in her TIME Person of the Year interview that I will never get out of my head: “I respond to extreme pain with defiance.” That tendency has always made her choice of Alwyn as the foil especially meaningful. One reason her re-recordings and this latest phase of her career have been so championed is that by placing herself in opposition to the music industry’s power brokers, Swift picked what felt like a worthy opponent. But you can trace most of the previous dips in her public approval rating to moments when her adversary was deemed less than worthy of the joust. The idea that Swift plays the victim has dogged her; in 2017, it was sticky enough for her to include it in the deliciously self-referential music video for “Look What You Made Me Do.”

So, can Swift pick a fight over her own heartbreak now? On the one hand, it seems like the obvious answer should be yes. It’s her life and it was her relationship—how could she not be entitled to her own story? On the other hand, this album is coming out in a moment in which Swift seems as close to invulnerable as she has ever been. She is the biggest artist on the planet. She is constantly photographed enjoying her life with her new boyfriend. She has a billion dollars and a roster of corporate partners. I’ll get defensive for just one second and offer a reminder that creating music is her job, but off these stories of her pain, she will make millions and millions more. You don’t have to convince me that the heartbreak here is real and that Swift felt she needed to make this album when the easy thing would have been to carry on with the re-recordings, touring, and having fun with Travis Kelce. I just don’t know that she can count on unequivocal sympathy—though I suppose that all depends on exactly how devastating these songs are going to be.

Well that’s all kind of intense! Can we, uh, just listen to the songs and not worry about all that?

Oh reader, who is definitely not just me posing the setups for the blurbs I want to write, how I long to see the world as you conceive it … That sounds like it would be really nice. I’m sure that’s possible for a lot of people. I wonder how many of them are reading this article. Something I’m trying to keep in mind this week is that my favorite line from Swift’s last album was karma is a cat, so this really just isn’t that serious. But the public conversation around Swift does have a rather combative vibe lately. The Cut ran a story the other day about people ending friendships over fights about Swift. My social media feeds are full of people arguing about Courtney Love simply being Courtney Love. Is it the inevitable backlash to success on a Swiftian scale? The byproduct of modern pop stardom’s emphasis on identity and personal narrative, and how personal and combative standom has become? Is this about Jack Antonoff, somehow? Probably a little of each. Stay safe out there.

OK, I’m kind of scared now, but the whole “Taylor Swift writing an entire new breakup album” thing had me really excited, and I do want to know what it might sound like.

Yes! As I mentioned, Swift mainly wrote this album with Antonoff and Dessner, so it figures that TTPD will have come out of the same bedroom pop and twinkly folk-pop sandboxes that crew has been playing in for three-plus album cycles. Swift once stated that she writes songs in three hypothetical pens—fountain pen for personal stories, quill pen for songs that function like period pieces, and glitter gel pen for silly dance songs—and, in a possible Easter egg, promos for this album have included images of quill and fountain pens, but no glitter gel pens.

I don’t mean to be dramatic but I will consider it a personal emergency if there are no bops. That said, let’s remember that Swift considers “Cruel Summer” to be a fountain-pen song.

Are there any other collaborators?

Yes. Post Malone is featured and credited as a writer on the first track, “Fortnight.” Florence and the Machine are featured and Florence Welch is credited as a writer on the song “Florida!!!” (It remains unclear if Florence brought the exclamation points, or how many exclamation points a truly tortured poet is permitted to use under Department guidelines.)

Side note: Is anyone having a better 2024 than Post Malone? He performed at the Super Bowl in February and is now the only person credited on both the new Beyoncé album and the new Taylor Swift album. He nearly saved the J.Lo “movie.” There is a snippet of an AI-imagined version of what “Fortnight,” might sound like making its way around TikTok, and even fake Post Malone sounds good on that. I look forward to hearing Posty on Drake’s next diss track.

I almost forgot—you mentioned earlier that Swift could have just kept going with the re-recordings … When Swift announced TTPD at the Grammys, I definitely thought she was going to announce Reputation (Taylor’s Version) instead. Where is it?!

Repeat after me: I will not be fooled by black-and-white typeface. I will not be fooled by black-and-white typeface. I will not be fooled by black-and-whi–

Admire the restraint. That said, she’s doing the Zodiac Killer stuff again, right? Are Swifties around the world spending the week searching for clues on sides of buildings or in QR codes?

No, why would you ask that?

I seem to have noticed something about … a morgue?

The album rollout seems to be doing a whole CSI thing that I haven’t quite figured out, honestly. Swift has been hiding the words to a secret message in song lyrics on Apple Music. The sentence is not yet complete, but as of Tuesday the phrase is: “HEREBY CONDUCT THIS POST,” with two words left to be revealed. While I personally hope the last two words are MALONE and then MALONE again, a lot of fans are guessing it’s something like “I HEREBY CONDUCT THIS POST MORTEM INVESTIGATION.” As in, the autopsy of a relationship that died. Promos have also included phrases like “enter into evidence” that sound like courtroom talk. So maybe we’re solving a murder? A pop-up installation promoting the album in Los Angeles included visuals of what is probably just a card catalog but what many fans interpreted as a morgue with what looked like un-sent wedding invitations poking out of the body drawers, which are apparently called “mortuary cabinets.” I can’t believe Taylor Swift made me Google that.

What does any of this have to do with poetry?

I … I really don’t know. The poets are being tortured in the department and the main poet died and now we’re going to solve the crime together? Her mind.

Should I be scared?

Probably a little. But you should also be excited. And bring tissues. I will leave you with this poem of my own:

The Tortured Poet

Has decided to fight back

Also, whose dog is this?