The queen of pop Taylor Swift released a new album on Friday. “The Tortured Poets Department” constitutes the eleventh opus of the American country singer who became a global megastar, shattering records one after the other.
“All is fair in love and poetry… The new album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ is available now,” she wrote on Instagram.
The star announced her release in February during the Grammy Awards ceremony, the prestigious American music awards where she won the trophy for best album of the year for the fourth time. Her millions of fans, the “Swifties”, have been impatiently waiting for her ever since and have tried to detect clues about what awaits them in each of the star’s publications.
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Musical collaborations
Among the known elements: the album contains collaborations with the British rock group Florence and The Machine and the American rapper Post Malone, who accompanies him on the first track “Fortnight”.
“I am a very big admirer of Post (Malone) because of his quality as an author, his musical experiments and these melodies that he composes and which stay in your head forever,” the singer wrote on Instagram on Thursday.
“I had the opportunity to see that magic come to life when we worked together on ‘Fortnight,'” she added, announcing the release of a music video late Friday. At the age of 34, Taylor Swift became the first artist to become a billionaire at the start of the year thanks to income from her music alone.
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An ex, rap and rock
Among the theories circulating about this new album, “The Tortured Poets Department” would be about the singer’s ex, the British actor Joe Alwyn. The name of the opus would also be taken from a group discussion called “The Tortured Man Club” (“The club of the tortured man”, in French) that the actor held with Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott, two other actors.
The list of tracks, sixteen in total, already gives some clues: “So Long, London”, “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” (“I can change it, no really I can”) and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” – an English man does indeed seem to be involved in the affair.
Returning, without taking gloves, to her former companions has also become a tradition for Taylor Swift, song after song. The current elected official is American football star Travis Kelce, recent Super Bowl winner. And for him, the new album “is incredible”.
Better than Frank Sinatra
With her new Grammy victory in February, Taylor Swift did better than American music legends like Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon or Stevie Wonder. Nearly twenty years after starting out, nothing seems likely to stop her.
His world tour, “Eras Tour”, is expected to bring in a total of two billion dollars in revenue after having already broken the symbolic ceiling of one billion last year, a first in the history of music.
Three weeks after Beyoncé
The Pennsylvania native has been writing songs since she was a teenager, getting her start in the country capital of Nashville. By gradually moving away from this very American style, she is climbing the rankings. In 2018, she left the Big Machine label and joined Universal, without the rights to her previous albums.
By re-recording her first records to regain control, she succeeded in convincing her fans and the music industry, another tour de force for this essential artist in American popular culture.
A hypothetical influence on the presidential election
With 283 million subscribers on Instagram, she is so influential among American youth that the political world is beginning to imagine the impact she could have on the presidential election in November, even if she rarely takes the lead. word on this subject.
Her new album landed on platforms three weeks after that of another American icon: Beyoncé and her “Cowboy Carter.” The singer’s new opus, with rich country influences, could be a competitor for the next Grammy. With perhaps, also, the new album of another star, Billie Eilish, which releases “Hit Me Hard and Soft” on May 17.
>> Read the RTSCulture article: With “Cowboy Carter”, the queen of R’n’B Beyoncé refreshes and politicizes country
But all these rich and influential artists insist at every opportunity: it’s the music that counts. This latest album, Taylor Swift recently said, “reminded me that writing music is what keeps me going.”
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Taylor Swift, “The Tortured Poets Department” (Republic Records). Published on April 19, 2024.
