Taylor Swift releases her 11th album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, leaked two days before, while on tour and with enormous expectation and secrecy | Culture

For a month and a half, April 19 was marked on the calendars of pop fans and, above all, of the millions of followers that Taylor Swift has. The day has come. This Friday the 34-year-old singer from Pennsylvania launched The Tortured Poets Department (already known as TTPD), their 11th studio album with 16 songs, two of them collaborations with Florence+The Machine and Post Malone. In fact, the song with the latter, Fortnight (quincena, in Spanish), has become the first single of the disk. An announcement that the artist made just a few hours before publishing all the songs. Because Swift has tried to maintain almost total secrecy with this highly anticipated work: she has been giving details in dribs and drabs, she has barely revealed some lyrics of the songs and she has not even released a single previous. But a couple of days before everything was about to blow up when the entire album was leaked on the Internet. It was Wednesday afternoon (in the US; in Europe late at night). What is considered the most anticipated musical release of 2024 began to leak when there were almost two days left for its publication. Despite the 34-year-old American artist’s tight control of her career and her narrative, the 16 songs on TTPD began to move through Telegram groups, and their links were shamelessly shared on Twitter. EL PAÍS had access to them and they were complete (they were not fragments) and of the highest quality. Neither Swift nor her team commented on the matter.

However, the leak was in doubt. First, because it could not be authentic, but rather come from someone else: putting together pieces, other music, other voices, by someone interested in sabotage. Then, because it could be a product of artificial intelligence, one of the most abundant theories. And also because it could even be a strategy of Swift herself. During the last few weeks and since the first day she announced the album, and as usual, she has released clues about it (in short videos, through QR codes placed in different cities around the planet or in an ephemeral installation that is resembles a small bookstore located in a shopping center in Los Angeles where fans have queued for hours), and in them the number two has been continuous in its messages, which is why there has been a lot of speculation about a double album, and this could be the first of them.

The mystery could only be revealed when the songs were known, this Friday. And the result has been clear: yes. It was the disk. But once released, the world has forgotten the controversy (partly thanks to the fact that his equipment has not gotten wet) and has focused on the songs. The 16 tracks are, as always with Swift, very personal. Two are written entirely by her, five with Aaron Dessner, a member of The National and with whom she also composed for Folklore, and eight with Jack Antonoff, from the group Bleachers, their usual producer. The songs are about his own life, as usual, his best material. Specifically, the breakup of her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn (in the fifth track,”goes so far as to say: How low did you think it would fall before it imploded? […] You swore you loved me, but where were the clues? “I died at the altar waiting for the test”]her brief romance with musician Matty Healy, from the group The 1975, and her current courtship with American football player Travis Kelce would be key to deciphering her lyrics. As curiosities, Stevie Nicks writes a poem to start the album and the actress Emma Stone appears in the credits of the song Florida!!! (the one who sings with Florence+The Machine), in the choirs.

In published message https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/1781171613058097619 Two minutes after the release of the album, Swift finally gave more information about it: “The Tortured Poets Department. An anthology of new works reflecting events, opinions and feelings from a fleeting, fatalistic moment in time, one that was both sensational and painful in equal measure. This period in the author’s life has already ended, the chapter is closed and walled up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once the wounds have healed. And, after some further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer firmly believes that our tears become sacred in the form of ink on a page. Once we have told our saddest story, we can free ourselves from it. And then the only thing left is tortured poetry.”

Swift is not the first to suffer a major leak. Great artists have gone through it: it happened to Radiohead, to Madonna in 2015, the same year as to Bjork in 2015, with what was her first album in four years; or to Wilco, which in 2002 saw its album leaked eight months before the planned release, something that also happened in 2004, 2007 and 2009. However, the proliferation of music on platforms had led people to think that leaks were something of the past, until now. In a year in which big names like Dua Lipa, SZA, Ariana Grande, Katy and Lana del Rey also release new music, leaks of works like these, kept under lock and key for months, further shield the industry. In her case, the reaction of her followers was important. The singer’s very loyal fans from Pennsylvania are very respectful of the singer. On social networks, many were debating whether to listen to her and downplay her idol’s release but thus satisfy their desire for new music… or whether to continue worshiping her and wait until Friday at 00:01 to hit the button. play. The latter have won, vetoing even the eager first.

In any case, it is difficult for this leak to affect sales or reproductions. Those who are accessing the album are the fans, who will continue buying their CDs and vinyl in physical format (many of them have done so in advance, so that it arrives at their home on the first day, something increasingly common in the US) and who They will give you thousands, millions of views on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. In any case, what does not seem to be going to suffer is Swift’s fortune. She is immersed in her The Eras Tour, an immense tour that started in March of last year and has already been seen by millions of people and with which it will return to the stage in May – with two stops in Madrid, among others – and will end in December in Canada. Thanks to her, the singer has already accumulated more than 1.1 billion dollars, according to the magazine Forbes. She may be angry, but she won’t lose a cent; Quite the opposite: the expectation will only continue to increase.