Taylor Swift’s Stardom Set To Soar Even Higher With New Album

Prepare for Taylor Swift, Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year, to shatter even more records in 2024.Ms. Swift tops the chart for most weeks at the no. 1 spot on Billboard, surpassing Elvis Presley. Her Eras Tour is an unmitigated triumph. She has sent American football ratings skyrocketing merely by attending a handful of games — one of them the Super Bowl — to support her boyfriend, Travis Kelce of the champion Kansas City Chiefs. She could have the power to sway the presidential election. The star, though, is poised to ascend even higher in the firmament of popular culture with the release of her 11th studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” on Friday at midnight. It feels as though the world is holding its breath for the latest rhymes and rhetoric from the singer-songwriter who rewrites the rules with every new release. Fans could get double the fun. Ms. Swift’s seemingly symbolic invocation of the number “two” in recent weeks is driving speculation that she will drop two albums. Ms. Swift, who tends to plant Easter eggs, made a peace sign with two fingers when she announced the album at the Grammy Awards in February. She made the same gesture while on tour at Tokyo and in recent social media posts. In an album teaser, two clocks are set to 2 p.m.“I want to say thank you to the fans by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years, …” Ms. Swift said after winning her 14th Grammy for her best pop vocal album, “Midnights.” That triumph, her fourth, shattered the record for most wins in the category. With that, the pop sensation announced the drop of “The Tortured Poets Department” and electrified her fan base of more than 137 million, or 53 percent of Americans.The album’s title, affectionately shortened by fans to “TTPD,” may sound a lot like the 1989 film starring Robin Williams, “Dead Poets Society,” but its inspiration could be closer to home for Ms. Swift. The Daily Mail reports that the name is a dig at the star’s ex-boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, who convened a WhatsApp group called “The Tortured Man Club.”“All’s fair in love and poetry,” Ms. Swift wrote in an Instagram post in February, disclosing what appears to be the album cover, where the singer, photographed in black and white, is sprawled across a bed. The frame cuts off at her eyes. Grayish hues and soft grain paint a contrast with Ms. Swift’s more colorful album covers of the past, suggesting a less pop-y, more subdued — or even melancholic — soundtrack.The tracklist for the album includes 16 songs, like “Down Bad,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” and “Guilty as Sin?” Featured artists comprise Post Malone as well as Florence & the Machine. Ms. Swift has teased her upcoming lyrics: “I wish I could un-recall how we almost had it all” is how she captioned a photo of herself holding a vinyl “TTPD” this week. Another caption shares the line, “Old habits die screaming… .”Ms. Swift has unveiled four editions of “TTPD,” named after each of the four bonus tracks — or what Swift has been calling “files” — “The Bolter,” “The Albatross,” “The Black Dog,” and “The Manuscript.”Buying variants of the album to access new bonus tracks — a business maneuver the star has used in the past — seems, to some, like a market ploy. “I’m glad I’m not the only Swiftie who feels like we’re getting taken advantage of,” one fan wrote in response to Ms. Swift’s Facebook post about “The Albatross” edition.Make no mistake, though, fans are fiending for Ms. Swift’s “files.”The album has the most pre-saves in Spotify history, the platform reports. It has broken the all-time record for the most illegally downloaded album, with 174,000 downloads, courtesy of a leaked version that has been circulating online. Fans are also pre-ordering “TTPD” on vinyl and CD, and gearing up for the album’s first music video, which will be out on Friday at 8 p.m.All of this makes it increasingly difficult to disagree with a recent announcement in Time that Ms. Swift is nothing less than “the main character of the world.”

Taylor Swift’s Stardom Set To Soar Even Higher With New Album

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