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Midnights

October 21, 2022

Midnights is Taylor’s tenth studio album, released on October 21, 2022, through Republic Records. A concept record about nocturnal ruminations, it was written and produced by Taylor with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. She has described the album as a collection of songs encapsulating “a journey through terrors and sweet dreams”. With Midnights, Taylor won “Album of the Year” at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, making her the only artist in history to win the honor four times.

With Midnights, Taylor crafted a concept album around the question, “What keeps you up at night?” Within the 13 tracks, she mines those sleepless hours and the intrusive thoughts that disrupt her and – by connection – us. Like a restless mind, the album jumps from regrets to the glow of infatuation, to self-loathing, to self-assertion, and to ruminating about past decisions. Part of the album’s power is how it enacts how our adult selves are inextricably marked and intertwined with, but never completely defined by, our childhood and adolescence. At 32, Taylor reflects on the ghosts of the past and maps the rarely straightforward journey of fully becoming one’s self.

Background and Announcement

After a dispute over the sale of the masters of her first six studio albums, Taylor announced plans to re-record them. She released the first two re-recordings, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and RED (Taylor’s Version), in 2021. Mainstream media expected her to release the third re-recording next. But then, Taylor dropped off the radar in 2022. As she was re-recording her previous albums, slipping back into her past self had unlocked something brilliant and fresh in her songwriting.

She finally made her grand return at the MTV Video Music Awards on August 28, 2022, where she garnered five nominations for “All Too Well (The Short Film),” winning three of them. In her acceptance speech for the “Video of the Year” award, she surprised the world by announcing a “brand new” studio album scheduled for release on October 21, 2022. Shortly after, her official website was updated with a clock counting down to midnight and the phrase “Meet me at midnight”. The canvases of some of her songs on Spotify were changed to a visual featuring the clock. At midnight, Taylor posted across her social media accounts that her tenth album would be titled Midnights, accompanied by a premise:

«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. 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.»

Taylor Swift

Her official website crashed due to heavy traffic following the posts.

Title Significance

Midnight is a recurring lyrical motif in Taylor’s music, having been used in different contexts and viewpoints in her preceding albums. She admitted herself that she’d always been inspired by the isolating feeling of sleeplessness, which is what led her to name the album Midnights:

«I think that I’ve always been fascinated with sleeplessness. My fans have pointed out over the years that I constantly am writing about 2am, middle of the night, things like that because I think that’s such a vulnerable, isolated time. It’s a time I’ve written a lot of my songs, it’s a time when the catharsis of songwriting has helped me the most. As far as a concept album – it was really fun for me to reflect back on any different midnights throughout my life, not just ones I had recently. I wanted it to be a really diverse range of emotions, and so I figured that the way to do that would be to stretch out the scope of time the album focuses on.»

Taylor Swift

The late-night theme of Midnights is a useful conceit that leaves a lot of space for variety in sound and subject matter. Nighttime is when we lie alone confronting our innermost thoughts, but it’s also prime real estate for partying. The record rests on this axis as it visits moonlit hours spent crying, fighting, dancing, drinking, and making out.

Writing and Production

According to Aaron Dessner, the first songs written for Midnights were “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” and “High Infidelity“. They were both created in March 2021, when he was staying at Taylor’s home in Los Angeles ahead of the Grammy Awards (where they would win the “Album of the Year” award for folklore). He told the podcast Broken Record in April 2023:

«I think the best song we've ever written is called 'Would've, Could've, Should've'. We wrote that song together, and recorded it, while we were together in LA for the folklore Grammys. So it goes back that far. And the same goes for 'High Infidelity'. Those songs we actually recorded in her house then. And eventually she obviously made most of Midnights with Jack and it became something different, but we made 'Would've, Could've, Should've, 'High Infidelity', 'The Great War' and 'Hits Different' together. And it was great to be a part of that record in that way. It was really special.»

Aaron Dessner

A couple of months later, Taylor enlisted Jack Antonoff, one of her closest friends and her longtime collaborator since 2013, to co-produce the album with her. The majority of the songs were written within a very short time frame from November to December of 2021, as a result of their partners, English actor Joe Alwyn and American actress Margaret Qualley, respectively, shooting in Panama for the romantic thriller film Stars at Noon (2022):

«This is our first album we’ve done with just the two of us as main collaborators. 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. Jack and I found ourselves back in New York, alone, recording every night, staying up late and exploring old memories and midnights past.»

Taylor Swift

The duo wrote 11 of the album’s 13 songs together; of the remaining two, Taylor wrote the track “Vigilante Shit” alone and “Sweet Nothing” with Joe Alwyn, who is credited with his pseudonym William Bowery. Meanwhile, Aaron Dessner’s collaboration with Taylor and Jack continued and he co-wrote and co-produced “The Great War” and “Hits Different,” which were both chosen as bonus tracks. Taylor had conceived the “3am tracks” on their “journey to find that magic 13”, and said that she released them because she wanted to share her entire creative process with fans.

Other collaborators, both old and new in the Taylor realm, include Mark Anthony Spears, a.k.a. Sounwave, who collaborated on three tracks with Taylor and Antonoff, Justin Vernon, Austin Swift, Dylan O’Brien, Rachel Antonoff, and Lana Del Rey.

Lyrics and Themes

On 2020’s folklore and evermore, Taylor stepped away from autobiographical songwriting and found new depths of feeling in fictional narratives. For perhaps the first time in a career built on curated lyrical bloodletting, she gave herself the gift of emotional distance. With Midnights, she returns to a diaristic style, addressing the central conflict of Taylor Swift, the individual and the persona. Here, she is an artist fully coming into her own in adulthood. She demonstrates her mastery of pop structure and style and, combined with her lyrical depth and openness to genre experimentation, places herself firmly in the conversation as her generation’s counterpart to luminaries like Joni Mitchell and Carole King.

According to Taylor, the subject matter of Midnights was inspired by five major topics: self-hatred, revenge fantasies, wondering what might have been, falling in love, and falling apart. It is a concept album about reflection, not reinvention. The thoughts that keep her up late are the ones she’s spent nine albums excavating: the unpredictable rise and devastating fall of romance; the binary of the “good girl” and the “bad girl,” and the chafing of societal expectation (that “1950s shit”); the uncomfortable acceptance of her own fallibility. Life, she declares, “is emotionally abusive.” And even though the memories Taylor recounts on Midnights are caught between yesterday and tomorrow, she has stated that the songs were all written in late 2021 to early 2022:

«Everything on Midnights is new work. Nothing is left over from a different album. It might’ve been ideas or concepts or things I’ve thought of maybe making in the past, but I didn’t write anything until I was making this album. I think that, in terms of referencing my previous work, that’s a fun thing for me to do that all does usually lead to something, but if we’re reflecting back on eras past, and music that I’ve made in the past, I think you’ll find that there’s a really good reason for that. But, it doesn’t necessarily have to do with this album. I will leave you with that very cryptic, but very truthful answer.»

Taylor Swift

If Taylor is a dedicated self-portraitist, Midnights is the first time she has allowed herself to edit her previous work. That confidence is the thing that binds the album together. What emerges is Taylor’s mature perspective on her own journey, a hard look at the determination, ambition, and sacrifices that got her to such rarefied altitude. Putting herself in conversation with her past self, she seems to be telegraphing that these songs — these polaroids of different midnights — capture accurately who she was during moments when fans thought they knew who she was: In “You’re on Your Own, Kid” she guttingly reframes a time when the public thought she had it all: “I hosted parties and starved my body / Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss”.

If Taylor had spent nearly two decades turning her life into a sort of text, Midnights is her attempt to play with what she has already written. This leads to an interesting realization: Those who have followed Taylor her entire career and have every chapter of her life memorized are fundamentally listening to a different album than the casual drop-ins. For the uninitiated, Midnights could be read as vague and lacking in specificity. But for those who have done the reading and listening, it is a cohesive and at times stunning development for a songwriter who had made evolution her signature.

Midnights Era

Midnights Era 2022-2024 “Meet me at midnight.” With the release of her tenth studio album, Midnights, Taylor became more universally loved than ever before. And when 20,000 people regularly started showing up outside her sold out “The Eras Tour” stadium shows a couple of months later, it became clear that something

Composition

Midnights is an example of pristine popcraft, weaving the intrusive thought themes within a gauzy dream-pop/synthpop tapestry that evokes the shifting shades of the night. Taylor is a gifted wordsmith adept at the art of pop hooks, and she and producer and collaborator Jack Antonoff are masterful in pop structure and tools. If her previous pop recordings were full-blown productions with radically distinct aesthetics, Midnights would be best staged in a black-box theater, where the stories change but the physical space remains consistently austere. In accordance with the lateness of the hour, the album explores moody, subdued hues. Built around vocal effects and vintage synths, it’s an understated sound more interested in setting atmosphere than chasing trends. In an interview with Music Radar in August 2023, Jack explained his analogue approach when producing Midnights:

«The funny thing about Midnights is, as synthetic as it is, it's actually very analogue. So much was going into tape. [...] That album was just wanting to push into a different place with synths. I was just trying to play with the boundaries of things I hadn't done before. So what happens if all my delays are coming from tape, and all my choruses are coming from outboard gear, and I'm just running everything through as much analogue outboard as possible to make it so incredibly rich? When I listen back to that album, I have these memories of putting myself into those places.»

Jack Antonoff

Art Direction

The album’s aesthetic has been described as “glam, but a chill, interior kind of glamor as opposed to big popstar glamor”, with midnight blue dominating the color palette and retro photographs featuring upholstery. Clock faces and “60s/’70s family-room decor” are also a part of the Midnights era. Vogue noted 1970s styles in Taylor’s fashion, marking a departure from the rural, cottagecore attire she had adopted for folklore and evermore.

Beth Garrabrant is the photographer of the Midnights photshoot, which took place in February 2022. It is her fifth collaboration with Taylor, having also been the one to shoot her artwork for folklore (2020), evermore (2020), Fearless (Taylor’s Version) [2021] and RED (Taylor’s Version) [2021].

The standard cover artwork of Midnights is minimalist. It takes inspiration from old-fashioned LP jackets whose songs were listed on the front cover. The photograph of Taylor featured in the standard edition artwork depicts her in blue eye shadow, black eye liner, and her signature red lips, observing a glimmering lighter held near her face. The typeface used is Neue Haas Grotesk, while the album title and track listing are in a blue gradient. The vinyl edition of the cover, posted by Taylor across her social media, splits the track list into an A-side and B-side, indicating a two-sided LP. Three limited-edition color variants of the physical album, featuring different cover artworks were also issued. Additionally, the reverse side of the standard and three alternate editions each portray a quarter sector of a dial; when assembled together and combined with a clock mechanism sold separately, they form a functioning clock.

Release and Promotion

To “defy” her usual routine of incorporating Easter eggs to hint at information, Taylor released a video series on TikTok called Midnights Mayhem With Me, consisting of thirteen episodes between September 21 and October 7, 2022. She unveiled the tracklist in a randomized order in the series, one song per episode, in front of a curtain backdrop, accompanied by an elevator music tune. A lottery cage containing 13 bingo balls numbered from one to thirteen, each representing a track of the album, was rolled, and when a ball dropped out, Taylor disclosed the title of the corresponding track on the album, through a telephone.

Some lyrics from Midnights were displayed on Spotify’s billboards across the world in the days leading up to the album’s launch, starting with New York City’s Times Square on October 17. Taylor also posted an itinerary, entitled “Midnights Manifest,” detailing the promotional events scheduled for the album. She limited her press appearances and did not perform, only appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on October 24,[95] and The Graham Norton Show on October 28. An iHeartRadio program called “Midnights with Taylor,” featuring commentary from her, ran on its pop stations from October 21 to 26, during which the album received airplay. She also answered some fan-submitted questions for Sirius XM Hits 1.

Midnights was finally released at midnight EDT on October 21, 2022. It marked Taylor’s fifth album release in the three-year span of 2020–2022, whereas she had released only four albums in the entire 2010s decade preceding that; commenting on the recent “rapid pace” of her album cycles, Taylor stated that she feels to create music “more freely” than she did during her 20s, and that she is “happier when [she] is making things more often.” On the “Midnights Manifest,” Taylor teased a “very chaotic surprise” occurring hours after the release, which was eventually revealed to be the extended album, entitled Midnights (3am Edition), containing seven bonus tracks; it was released at 03:00 EDT.

Taylor announced the Midnights (The Til Dawn Edition) on May 24, 2023. It was released two days later on May 26 and features the previously unreleased song “You’re Losing Me (From The Vault)“, as well as two remixes; “Snow On The Beach (Feat. More Lana Del Rey)” and “Karma (Feat. Ice Spice)“.

Singles

The lack of a pre-released single led to speculation over the album’s sound. Variety opined Midnights could either “continue in that more subdued, acoustic, Americana vein” of folklore and evermore, or return to the “pure pop” of Lover (2019) and its immediate predecessors. Fortune and El País commended the promotional roll-out for its “aura of mystery and excitement” and the “art of suspense”. Slate and I-D opined that Midnights is “the result of a winning formula” — hybridizing the modern “surprise-drop approach”, which cements the album release as a “proper newsworthy event”.

Upon the album’s release, “Anti-Hero” was finally announced as the lead single of Midnights. Republic Records released the song to the US hot adult contemporary radio on October 24, 2022, followed by contemporary hit radio on October 25. It became the best-selling song of 2022. “Bejeweled” and “Question…?” were released for limited-time digital download exclusively through Taylor’s website on October 25, as promotional singles. “Lavender Haze” was released to American contemporary hit radio as the second single on November 29, 2022.

Critical Reception

Midnights received widespread acclaim from music critics, most of whom praised its subdued production and vocals. On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized score out of 100 to ratings from publications, the album received a weighted mean score of 85 based on 23 reviews, indicating “universal acclaim”.

Rolling Stone‘s Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield dubbed Midnights a classic; Spanos praised Taylor’s “brilliant and fresh” songwriting style, while Sheffield highlighted the production and mood. Variety‘s Chris Willman praised Taylor’s vocals, Jack Antonoff’s production, and the artistic choice to abandon “bangers” for mid-tempo pop. Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph admired Taylor’s “intimate” songcraft, melodies and lyrics. Lucy Harbron of Gigwise appreciated her reinvention and experimentation in Midnights.

The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis described the album as a sophisticated, “tastefully subdued” record with “confident” songwriting and “understated” production. Ann Powers, in her NPR review, felt the album is Taylor’s most “challenging” and complimented her “glamorous, gleaming” voice, while Matthew Neale of Clash cited her songwriting prowess and “swagger”, naming Midnights a “near-perfect” body of work. Helen Brown of The Independent wrote, Taylor “unpacks her darkest dreams, deepest doubts and cruelest thoughts” using “feline vocal stealth” and “assured lyrical control”. NME‘s Hannah Mylrea said the album marks Taylor’s return to pop, offering “future-facing sounds” and candid lyrics. Entertainment Weekly‘s Marc Hirsh complimented its sound, concept and themes. Mikael Wood of Los Angeles Times admired Taylor’s “strong” vocals emphasizing her grain and cadences. Elise Ryan of the Associated Press called the album a product of her maturity and artistic evolution. Billboard‘s Jason Lipshutz wrote it’s “a focused, legacy-extending” album with “razor-sharp” lyricism.

Taylor Swift performing on "The Eras Tour" (2023)

Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour

Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour 2023-2024 This article is about the tour. For the concert film, see Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour (2023). For the book, see Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Book (2024).“The Eras Tour” (stylized as “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour”) was Taylor’s sixth headlining tour. A homage to her entire discography, she described it as

Commercial Performance

Midnights is Taylor’s most commercially successful album to-date. The album broke a string of sales, streaming, digital, vinyl and official chart records globally. It achieved the all-time Spotify record for the most streamed album in a single day, garnering 186 million streams in its opening day on the platform, surpassing the previous record of 155 million streams by Drake’s Certified Lover Boy (2021). Taylor also became the most-streamed artist in a single day on Spotify, with 228 million streams across her entire catalog, the first artist to cross the 200-million mark. The album further broke the Apple Music record for the most-streamed pop album in a single day, the Amazon Music records for the most-streamed album in a single day and week, and the first album to amass over 700 million Spotify streams within a week. According to Republic Records, Midnights moved three million album-equivalent units worldwide in its first week, and over six million in two months.

In the United States, Midnights sold over 800,000 pure copies in its first day, marking the best-selling album of 2022 and the biggest sales week for an album since Taylor’s own reputation (2017). It surpassed 1.2 million units in its first three days, becoming her fifth album to open with one million sales — a record unique to her, and reached 1.4 million units by the fifth day, as well as 1.05 million pure sales, marking the largest opening week of the last seven years and Taylor’s career-best. Midnights topped the Billboard 200 for six weeks, and spent thirteen consecutive weeks atop the Top Album Sales chart—the most since Titanic: Music from the Motion Picture (1997). It opened with 1,578,000 units, of which 1.14 million were pure sales, including 575,000 vinyl LPs and 395,000 CDs. It became the year’s best-selling vinyl LP and CD. Midnights garnered 549.26 million streams in its first week, the third-largest streaming week of all time. Taylor tied Barbra Streisand for the most No. 1 albums among women (11), and most consecutive No. 1 debuts, surpassing Eminem and Kanye West. Midnights became the first 21st-century album to sell over one million vinyl LPs in the US.

All of the album’s 20 tracks debuted in the top 45 of the US Billboard Hot 100, giving Taylor a total of 188 Hot 100 entries; the 13 standard tracks arrived in the Top 15, led by “Anti-Hero”, Taylor’s ninth US No. 1 song. Taylor became the first act to control the entire Top 10 of the Hot 100 concurrently; the woman with the most Top 10 entries (40), surpassing Madonna (38); the first act to debut atop the Billboard 200 and Hot 100 simultaneously four times; and the first act to occupy the entire Top 10 of the Hot 100, Streaming Songs, and Digital Songs charts together. Midnights is the first album in history with ten Top 10 songs. Billboard noted its streams were strong enough to monopolize the Top 10 without airplay or digital sales. Taylor ranked as 2022’s Billboard Year-End top female artist.

Internationally, Midnights garnered the best opening-week units of 2022 in several countries, including Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It marked the best opening week for a western or international artist in China, Germany and Taiwan, and Taylor’s best yet in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the UK. It also broke the record for the largest vinyl sales week of the 21st-century in Australia, Canada, and the UK.

In the UK, Midnights sold over 140,000 units in its first three days, becoming the fastest-selling album of 2022. The album debuted atop the UK Albums Chart with 204,000 units. She broke Madonna’s record for the shortest time for a female act to accumulate nine UK No. 1 albums, and became the first woman since Miley Cyrus in 2013 to simultaneously debut atop both the albums and singles chart, following the number-one debut of “Anti-Hero” as well. Midnights marked Taylor’s eighth No. 1 album on the Irish Albums Chart and the biggest opening week since Ed Sheeran’s ÷ (2017).

Midnights became Taylor’s record-extending tenth consecutive No. 1 album in Australia, with the biggest opening week since reputation. It also set the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) records for the biggest streaming and vinyl sales weeks for an album. All of the album’s standard tracks entered the ARIA Singles Chart, occupying the entire top 14 region. With the debut of “Anti-Hero” atop the singles chart, Taylor earned a record-breaking third Australian “Chart Double” of her career. Midnights was her 11th consecutive No. 1 album on the New Zealand Albums Chart as well. The album sold over 200,000 digital albums in its first day on China’s QQ Music. It garnered the biggest first-week Spotify streams ever for an album in Brazil and the Philippines.

Accolades

Taylor received numerous accolades for Midnights. She achieved over 20 Guinness World Record entries with the release of the album, including: the most streamed album on Spotify in 24 hours (184.6 million streams), the most first-day streams of an album on Spotify (184.6 million streams), and the most streamed act on Spotify in 24 hours (228 million streams). She won all of her three nominations at the 48th People’s Choice Awards, including the “Female Artist of 2022” and also won several 2023 iHeartRadio Awards, including the special “Innovator Award.” In September 2023, Taylor took home nine awards at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards, including “Artist of the Year”. At the 66th Annual Grammy Awards in 2024, Midnights and its songs received six nominations, winning two; “Best Pop Vocal Album” and “Album of the Year,” making Taylor the only act to win the latter award four times, breaking her tie for most wins. It also marked her sixth nomination in that category and an all-time record for a female artist tied with Barbra Streisand. Accepting the award, Taylor said:

«I would love to tell you that this is the best moment of my life, but I feel this happy when I finish a song or when I crack the code to a bridge that I love or when I’m shotlisting a music video or when I’m rehearsing with my dancers or my band or getting ready to go to Tokyo to play a show. For me, the award is the work. All I want to do is keep being able to do this. I love it so much. It makes me so happy. It makes me unbelievably blown away that it makes some people happy who voted for this award too. All I want to do is keep doing this. So thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to do what I love so much. Mind blown. Thank you so much.»

Taylor Swift

Impact and Legacy

The Midnights cover artwork became an internet trend, mimicked and parodied by social media users, including official accounts of brands, organizations and celebrities. Spotify’s servers crashed for several minutes when the album was released.

Critical commentary described the pan-format success of Midnights in the streaming era as unprecedented. Various publications dubbed Taylor as the paramount pop star of the 21st century, wielding a commercial and cultural dominance surpassing those of her contemporaries. Billboard noted how the album’s success is “evenly” distributed across streaming, album sales and track sales, unlike other albums of 2022. Financial Times pondered whether Taylor is “the last pop superstar”, underscoring the 1.5 million first-week units — a figure unseen since the “1990s boy bands” era, which was regarded as the peak for the US music business. Music publisher Matt Pincus called Taylor “basically an intellectual property franchise now. Like a DC movie”. Fortune compared her to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I-D dubbed her the “last remaining real popstar”, capable of “shifting more albums and filling more stadiums than her contemporaries […] unseen since the industry’s golden era”. Noting a 2021 article from The New York Times that asked “if Adele couldn’t sell more than a million albums in a single week, could any artist?” after her album 30 missed the mark, Rolling Stone responded that Taylor “has once again moved the goalposts regarding what the music industry can see as possible from a major pop star”.

Many journalists acknowledged Taylor’s longevity. Slate underscored how her career has lasted longer than that of the Beatles, and broke the band’s once-deemed “unbeatable” records. Business journalist Greg Jericho, in The Guardian, lauded her ability to remain culturally relevant and successful 18 years into her music career, writing that the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen were past their prime at that stage. Bree Player of Marie Claire wrote, “The word ‘icon’ is thrown around far too liberally these days, but Miss Swift is a living legend.” When Jimmy Fallon listed Taylor the album’s achievements at The Tonight Show, she expressed her gratitude for the success but underscored the ageism regarding female singers:

«I’m beside myself, really. [...] I’m also feeling very soft and fragile. The two can exist at once. But the fact that the fans have done this, like the breaking of the records and the going out to the stores and getting it, it’s…you know, I’m 32, so we’re considered geriatric pop stars. They start to put us out to pasture at age 25, I’m just happy to be here.»

Taylor Swift

The Washington Post proclaimed that Taylor dominated 2022. According to CNET, 2022 is the most prominent year of her career, led by the “mainstream cultural success” of Midnights. Bloomberg News reported that the album generated $230 million in sales for Universal Music Group in 2022, accounting for 3% of their annual revenue — the highest from any artist. As a result, Taylor was the highest-paid woman in entertainment in 2022, earning US$92 million.

The Stories of 13 Sleepless Nights

It’s a testament to the body of work (the world, really) that Taylor has built over time, song by song, that Midnights doesn’t immediately eclipse everything else she’s done. Because upon its release in October 2022, Midnights became the biggest album of all time on streaming services by first-day and first-week streams worldwide (a record which she broke again with THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT in April 2024). Afterwards, it became a steady, friend-like presence—anchoring each night of “The Eras Tour” and producing singles like “Anti-Hero” and “Bejeweled” that, in addition to being chart mainstays in 2023, spoke to where Taylor was at this point in time as a songwriter, and where was headed next.

Artist

Taylor Swift

Released

October 21, 2022

Recorded

March 2021-2022

Studios

Rough Customer (Brooklyn)
Electric Lady (New York)
Henson Recording (Los Angeles)
Long Pond (Hudson Valley)
Conway (Los Angeles)
Sharp Sonics (Los Angeles)
Kitty Committee (Los Angeles)

Genre

Electronica
Synth Pop
Bedroom Pop
Dream Pop

Length

44:02 (Standard Edition)
69:00 (3am Edition)
81:26 (Til Dawn Edition)
77:06 (Late Night Edition)

Label

Republic Records

Producers

Jack Antonoff
Aaron Dessner
Sounwave
Jahaan Sweet
Keanu Beats
Taylor Swift