Swifties, rejoice!
Taylor Swift's new music is finally out! When the clock struck midnight on the East Coast, the 32-year-old singer's 10th studio album, Midnights, was released at last!
The songstress took to Instagram the moment the album dropped to share her gratitude for one of her main collaborators, Jack Antonoff.
"Midnights is a wild ride of an album and I couldn’t be happier that my co pilot on this adventure was @jackantonoff. He’s my friend for life (presumptuous I know but I stand by it) and we’ve been making music together for nearly a decade HOWEVER… this is our first album we’ve done with just the two of us as main collaborators," she wrote, alongside a slideshow of photos of herself and the Bleachers frontman.
"We’d been toying with ideas and had written a few things we loved, but Midnights actually really coalesced and flowed out of us when our partners (both actors) did a film together in Panama," she continued. "Jack and I found ourselves back in New York, alone, recording every night, staying up late and exploring old memories and midnights past."
"Midnights is a collage of intensity, highs and lows and ebbs and flows. Life can be dark, starry, cloudy, terrifying, electrifying, hot, cold, romantic or lonely," Swift concluded. "Just like Midnights. Which is out now."
The singer-songwriter also opened up about her new album during a conversation with New Music Daily on Apple Music. Swift explained in the interview, which dropped Friday morning, that "one of the themes about Midnights is how you’re feeling in the middle of the night and that can be intense self-hatred you go through these very polarizing emotions when you’re up late at night and you’re brain just spirals, it can spiral downward or it can spiral way up and you can just be really feeling yourself."
Swift also opened up about her new song, "Karma," sharing that the track was "written from a perspective of feeling like really happy, really proud of the way your life is, feeling like this must be a reward for doing stuff right."
"It’s a song that I really love because I think we all need some of those moments, you know? We can’t just be beating ourselves up all the time. You have to have these moments where you’re like, 'You know what? Karma is my boyfriend and that’s it.'"
Always keeping fans on their toes, it turned out the GRAMMY-winning singer had more songs up her sleeve aside from the pre-announced 13 tracks. Early Friday -- at 3 a.m. to be exact -- Swift revealed a second edition of her Midnights album, featuring seven more songs.
"Surprise! I think of Midnights as a complete concept album, with those 13 songs forming a full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour. However! There were other songs we wrote on our journey to find that magic 13," she explained in an Instagram post. "I’m calling them 3am tracks. Lately I’ve been loving the feeling of sharing more of our creative process with you, like we do with From The Vault tracks. So it’s 3am and I’m giving them to you now."
Swift first announced the 13-track album while she was accepting the Video of the Year award at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards in August.
Ahead of the highly anticipated release, Swift shared a teaser for the forthcoming music videos she's created for the Midnights era. "Here’s the teaser trailer for the videos I’ve made for Midnights. Thank you @amazonmusic for premiering this, the first video for Anti-Hero will be out tomorrow at 8am ET. And Midnights will be here SO SOON!!!" For her "Anti-Hero" visual -- written and directed by Swift -- the performer brought her nightmares and intrusive thoughts to life, including a comically horrifying version of her own funeral.
In her first Instagram post about the album, Swift quickly got fans talking by sharing the release date, Oct. 21, which happened to be on one-time foe Kim Kardashian's 42nd birthday.
"We lie awake in love and in fear, in turmoil and in tears. We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren't -- right this minute -- about to make some fateful life-altering mistake," she wrote in her announcement of the album.
"This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching - hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve... we'll meet ourselves."
Swift continued the album promo by hosting Midnights Mayhem With Me, in which she unveiled the song's titles one by one. There was "Lavender Haze," which she teased was about her relationship with Joe Alwyn, "Snow On the Beach," a song about falling in love and featuring Lana Del Rey, and "Anti-Hero," which Swift called "a real guided tour throughout all the things I tend to hate about myself."
Spotify later revealed select lyrics from the album. Eventually, co-writers were unveiled, revealing collabs with Zoe Kravitz, Jack Antonoff, and Alwyn, under his pen name, William Bowery.
Midnights is out now.
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