Like she said at the Grammys, Taylor had begun conceiving the album immediately after submitting Midnights to her record label and continued working on it in secret throughout the first US leg of “The Eras Tour” in early 2023. While she was creating the album, her dating life was once again a widely covered topic in the press, who reported on the end of her six-year-relationship with English actor Joe Alwyn, her short-lived association with English singer-songwriter Matty Healy, and the eventual public hard-launch with NFL star Travis Kelce in detail. At one of her “The Eras Tour” concerts in Melbourne in February 2024, Taylor said that THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT was a “lifeline” for her during these months:
TORTURED POETS arguably makes for Taylor’s most honest and cutting album. It is an emotional outpouring from the most famous musician in the world at the peak of her power, which conveys the fraught transition from experiencing the “love of my life” to the “loss of my life.” Taylor had worked with all kinds of artists over the years, but on her recent projects, she had remained consistent when it came to the teams of producers, songwriters, and featured artists she chose to work with. This is clear with THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT as well, which lists just seven people in the writing and production credits. Most of the songs are written by Taylor, her long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff, and The National’s Aaron Dessner. Antonoff is the main producer of the album’s standard edition, Dessner the one of THE ANTHOLOGY. Upon the album’s release, Aaron wrote:
The complication with
TORTURED POETS is the friction of each of Taylor’s tortured selves battling for supremacy; the artist, the person, the lover, the celebrity. As the most famous woman in the world, how do you respond to those who have wronged you when any reaction at all is seen as a ‘punch down’? How do you address the survival instincts that kicked in amidst scrutiny? How do you retain the identity of the Vulnerable Girl Next Door? How do you discuss the lethal impact of fame and not also take shots at those who made you famous? How do you write honestly when your persona has eclipsed your art?
reputation (2017) is famously referred to as Taylor’s angry, vengeful album, when in reality it tells a love story. This time around though, she is mad as hell for real, aiming shots not only at professional enemies and critics, but also her fans and herself. The sentiments “fuck it” and “fuck ’em” recur. In order to brush off the effects of “soliloquies [she’ll] never see” Taylor has to acknowledge their existence and, in turn, its impact on her psyche. To seem removed from the cages that constrained her, she has to attack the jailer.
In many ways, on this album Taylor paints an unflattering picture of herself. Her lyrical punches land in equal measure on former paramours, critical detractors, and her own face. She is bereft and bewildered. She sings of being so depressed she can’t get out of bed, comfort-eating children’s cereal, and crying at the gym. There is also a dialogue between her teen and adult selves. “
But Daddy I Love Him” is a sharp-tongued rebuff to the “judgmental creeps” who disapproved of her publicly controversial lover, Matty Healy. It is also an update of “
Love Story” (2008), with a slightly older Romeo and Juliet, except this time her Shakespearean references come from
Hamlet. In “
The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” she turns on the muse himself, more venomous than ever:
“Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead? Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed? Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy? In 50 years time will all this be declassified and you’ll confess why you did it? And I’ll say, ‘Good riddance.’ Cause it wasn’t sexy once it wasn’t forbidden.”
After the
Grammy announcement, Taylor revealed the standard track listing via social media on February 6, 2024. In total, she announced four physical editions that were each titled after a corresponding bonus track: “
The Manuscript“, “
The Bolter“, “The Albatross”, and “
The Black Dog.” She also partnered with Target for an exclusive “Phantom Clear” collector’s vinyl edition.
Apart from talking about it on “The Eras Tour”, Taylor promoted the album on digital platforms like
Apple Music,
Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, and Threads, prompting fans to search for Easter eggs. Most notably, this included five Taylor-curated Apple Music playlists containing her old songs inspired by the five stages of grief; a pop-up library of curated articles at The Grove, Los Angeles, hosted by Spotify; QR code murals in various cities worldwide that led to unlisted YouTube shorts on Taylor’s channel; a countdown to the album’s release revealed upon refreshing Taylor’s Instagram profile; and special shimmer effects on Threads posts tagged with hashtags related to Taylor and the album. iHeartRadio and Sirius XM announced special programs with exclusive content from Taylor to celebrate the album’s release; the former temporarily rebranded as “iHeartTaylor”.
Finally,
THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT was released on April 19, 2024. A double album edition, subtitled
THE ANTHOLOGY and containing 15 bonus tracks, was surprise-released digitally two hours later. From May 2024, starting with the Paris shows, Taylor revamped the set list of “The Eras Tour” to include songs from
TORTURED POETS in a new act, which she informally described as “Female Rage the Musical”.
She released the live versions as bonus tracks on the physical album via her website. Other limited editions of the physical album included acoustic versions of selected tracks. Limited digital variants contained first draft phone demo recordings of certain tracks.
As the title suggests, THE ANTHOLOGY is a series of scattered musings and ruminations on different aspects of Taylor’s life and career, obscured through either a fictional or metaphorical lens. The songs are sadder and quieter. It feels like an album all of its own, stylistically removed from the first 16 tracks. Most of it is subtle, acoustic folk, with occasional detours, and a cosmology all of its own. While revisiting some topics of the main release, it also offers several character studies and quiet introspections into Taylor’s psyche. When announcing the double album, she explained:
Upon release, publications described the critical consensus over the album as either positive or mixed. A number of critics regarded the album a landmark in Taylor’s discography. Reviews from The Independent‘s Helen Brown, The Arts Desk‘s Ellie Roberts, The Times‘ Dan Cairns, PopMatters‘s Jeffrey Davies, and Will Harris of Q praised the album as one of her most solid outputs, considering the musical composition, vocal stylings and lyrical tonality as ambitious and tastefully experimental. Others, including Variety‘s Chris Willman, the i‘s Ed Power, and The Observer‘s Kitty Empire, called it a quintessential Taylor album containing some of the best songs of her career.
Taylor’s songwriting was a source of compliment. The Line of Best Fit‘s Paul Bridgewater dubbed it her most cohesive body of work to-date, finding the music sophisticated and the lyricism symbolic. To Ludovic Hunter-Tilney of the Financial Times, the album is a stylistic evolution for Taylor, with writing that marks a “characteristically appealing turn” into moody melodrama. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian and Alex Hopper of American Songwriter thought that the album has Swift’s wittiest lyrics, featuring nuanced musical choices that show Swift is “willing to take risks in a risk-averse era for pop” and “constantly evolving and pushing her limits”, respectively.
The tumultuous mood and unconstrained emotion of the lyrics were also highlighted. Multiple reviews complimented the album’s heavy, unfiltered emotion; Clash‘s Lauren Webb described it as “a spell-binding, toxic, chaotic illustration” of deteriorating mental sanity. Powers opined that TORTURED POETS showed Taylor’s newfound freedom, with a “lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself”. In a similar perspective, rave reviews from Rolling Stone‘s Rob Sheffield and Variety‘s Chris Willman described the album as a “gloriously chaotic” and “audacious, transfixing” project, respectively
Many critics proffered up their sour reviews soon after the album’s release because they felt miffed this album wasn’t manufactured for their approval. Both in length and in density of the inner sanctum of lore required to even understand the album, TORTURED POETS was designed to weed out the weak. And that means first to go are the critics who “[stay] up until dawn to finish listening to an album as if it’s a college paper we’re cramming to complete by the morning” as remarked upon by Bloomberg’s Jessica Karl the Tuesday following the record’s release. On its languishing length, Oliver Darcy for CNN retracted in his seven day follow up review of the album, “It takes more than a day to get one’s arms around a 31-track album like TORTURED POETS. Swift’s album demands time to be fully appreciated. It cannot be devoured at the speed of TikTok.” Adding, “One week later … I am ready to declare that it is one of Swift’s best works yet.” Others were also sharp enough to acknowledge they weren’t Swiftie Smart enough to understand the album’s parasocially parochial themes with Keefe noting, “Whether any particular listener will find a point of entry, then, depends wholly on how interesting they find Swift’s unfiltered and unedited versions of these same few stories, told and re-told many times over.”
As Ben Sisario for the New York Times asked, “[viewing] Taylor Swift’s work through the eyes of her fans [is] crucial for understanding … The question is not just what is Swift saying, but what is she telling her fans, and how will they respond to it?”.
The album continued to chart at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for 15 total non-consecutive weeks, becoming the longest-leading chart topper in Taylor’s career. It is also the third album in history and first by a female artist to spend its first 12 weeks atop the chart.
All 31 songs from THE ANTHOLOGY debuted on the Billboard Hot 100, occupying the entire Top 14 simultaneously for the first time in chart history. Taylor set the record for most simultaneous entries by a female artist (32) and became the first woman to surpass 50 career Top 10 songs. Sales were boosted by multiple variants of the album, with double-digit variants in digital and CD mediums.
THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT broke chart records in other countries as well. In Germany, it recorded the largest streaming day for an album and debuted atop the chart with the highest sales week for an international solo artist in seven years. In the United Kingdom, it became the fastest-selling album by any artist in seven years and by a non-British artist in 18 years, and it tied Taylor with Madonna for the most female No. 1 albums on the UK Albums Chart (12). It became the fastest-selling vinyl album since 1994 and Taylor’s album with the most weeks at No. 1 (8). On the Australian ARIA Charts, TORTURED POETS became Taylor’s 13th No. 1 album, a record among female artists; its songs set records for the most simultaneous entries by a single artist in the Top 10 (10), Top 50 (29), and Top 100 (31) of the singles chart. Debuting atop the Canadian Albums Chart as Taylor’s 14th consecutive chart topper, the album registered the highest single-week vinyl sales and streaming figures in chart history.
THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT received numerous accolades. At the 2024 ARIA Awards, Taylor won in the category for “Top International Artist.” At the 67th Annual Grammy Awards, the album was nominated for both “Best Pop Vocal Album” and “Album of the Year.” The latter was Taylor’s record-extending seventh nomination in the category. Reacting to the news, she said:
Instead of functioning as a victory lap for Taylor, THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT is emotionally unguarded and knowingly messy, dividing critics and inspiring immediate fan devotion on its way to the biggest first-week debut of her career. Jack Antonoff told Billboard in October 2024:
Upon the album’s announcement and release, there were many debates about which relationship Taylor had dedicated it to. But that is hardly the point. Taylor is one of the most accomplished songwriters of all time because of her musical and literary prowess, not because of the men in her life. It has been true all her career, but especially in 2024: It is finally time to stop linking a woman’s successes to her romantic relationships. Considering this, TORTURED POETS is not an album for the fans, not one for the critics and certainly not for the lovers in her life. This is an incredibly vulnerable collection of songs, a translation of pain that was brave to share. This album is for Taylor Swift. She is the author of her life. This is her story.
THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT leaves the listener with lots of material to digest. A greater appreciation of each track comes with time. It is a glimpse into the psyche of the most famous person on the planet. And for many, it is also a representation of both girlhood and womanhood, with all it entails: insecurities, mistakes, and lessons learned. But it is not a reflection of Taylor’s state of mind at the time of the album’s release:
What is clear, is that this is Taylor’s final statement on her tumultuous life from 2023-2024. She insisted on the fact that the music is now removed from its original context and made new by its listeners. As she concludes in “The Manuscript,” the final track of THE ANTHOLOGY: “Now and then I re-read the manuscript. But the story isn’t mine anymore.”
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