NEW YORK – Could there be a Taylor Swift new album rollout without a few additional surprises?
No.
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On Friday, the pop star released her 11th album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” an amalgamation of her previous work and reflecting the artist who — at the peak of her powers — has spent the last few years re-recording her life’s work and touring its material, filtered through synth-pop anthems, breakup ballads, provocative and matured considerations.
But that was midnight. At 2 a.m. Eastern, she released “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional songs.
“I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment,” Swift wrote in an Instagram caption. “And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”
The songs are a natural continuation of the first half of the album; many return to her “evermore” and “folklore” sound, with an assist from her collaborator Aaron Dessner.
This is not Swift’s first time surprising her fans, and certainly not her first time doing so with a surprise album release. A few months after “folklore” was released in 2020, she announced “evermore” would arrive at the midnight the same day. And speaking of midnight, she dropped a “3am” edition of “Midnights” featuring seven new tracks in 2022 a handful of hours after the original release.