This is what their new album “The Tortured Poet Department” sounds like

Fans have been waiting since February, now Taylor Swift has released her new album: “The Tortured Poets Department” (“TTPD” for short) was released tonight. The biggest pop star in the world sounds a little different than on previous releases and is still 100% Taylor Swift. This is a concept album about heartbreak, a “Sgt. Pepper” from Heartbreak. The speaker’s voice carries through the songs. It’s reminiscent of the romcom Notting Hill, that famous scene in which Anna (Julia Roberts) says to William (Hugh Grant): “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy and asking him to love her.” “

Very personal. Each song seems like its own poetic essay about an aspect of falling in and out of love. This time, Taylor Swift and her collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner (The National) were apparently less concerned with writing hits than with arranging their songwriting into a cycle about a theme. The first part of the album in particular is intense and offers bittersweet, lump-in-the-throat verses in “So Long, London”. The arrangements serve the lyrics even more strongly than usual. In song 13 the mood changes: “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” is a self-empowerment anthem in synthpop guise: “I’m good!”

The inhalation, sigh and gathering of strength before “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”.

There are so many. Maybe: “All my mornings / Are Mondays / Stuck in an / Endless February” from “Fortnight.” Or: “You’re not Dylan Thomas / I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel” from the title song. Or “Crash the party like record scratch / As I scream: Who’s afraid of little old me? / You should be.” Or: “Beauty is a beast that roars / Down on all fours / Demanding: More”.

Very good. Taylor Swift presents her most mature songwriting. The songs seem like conversations. It’s as if Swift was sitting cross-legged on the sofa next to the audience in wool socks and whispering the latest news about her relationship status. Some songs take surprising turns, such as “Fresh Out The Slammer”. She sometimes varies the styles: “Fortnight” has an electro sound, “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” is mixed with country quotes. Swift could have made it easy for herself and released an album with ten uptempo hits plus a tearjerker ballad at the height of her popularity. Instead, she dares to do something. Nevertheless, “TTPD” is too long at 16 tracks.

Earlier last year, Swift split from British actor Joe Alwyn, whom she had dated for six years. The first ideas and recordings for “TTPD” probably occurred in the final phase of this relationship. Fans speculate that the album title quotes a chat group that Alwyn mentioned in an interview. He and his colleagues Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott communicate on WhatsApp as the “Tortured Man Club”. Her ex Matty Healy from the band The 1975 could also be mentioned in some songs. Speaking in Melbourne in February this year, Swift said songwriting was something that helped her get through life. And she has never needed it more urgently than with “TTPD”. She started working on it two years ago. That’s the great thing about this artist, that she seems to process experiences in real time by writing songs about them. By doing this, she literally makes sense of it and allows her to overcome bad experiences and leave them behind.

The black and white photo was taken by Beth Garrabrant, who is also responsible for the cover of “Folklore”. The discussions about why Swift doesn’t use an apostrophe in the album title are very nice – either like this: “The Tortured Poet’s Department”. Or like this: “The Tortured Poets’ Department.” Erin Weinberg, an English lecturer at the University of Manitoba in Canada, posted on “Lectured: “Without an apostrophe, the noun ‘Poets’ is attributive, as if it were an adjective. Like in the movie “The Dead Poets Society”. The word Poets then describes what kind of department it is.”

Taylor Swift has released five playlists for “The Tortured Poets Department” on Apple Music. They consist of their own pieces from their previously released albums, each bear a title from the new record and are thematically grouped according to the different phases of heartbreak. The special thing about it is that each list is preceded by an audio message from the artist in which she refers to “denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance”. This five-phase model goes back to the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), who used it to describe how terminally ill people deal with their situation. Swift is following a theory that her fans put forward after the track list for “TTPD” was released. Swifties had suspected that the theme of the record was not wanting to believe it, anger, bargaining, depression and consent. “And when the Swifties agree on a theory, Taylor listens – so she’s curated a series of exclusive playlists with songs to suit each phase,” says Apple Music.

Unusually quiet. What’s downright sensational is that there wasn’t even a pre-release single until a few hours before the album was released. Swift announced the album at the Grammy Awards. Shortly afterwards she published the artwork as well as the title and order of the songs. In Los Angeles there was a “library installation” with references to the album. That’s basically it. The reason for the remarkable approach could be that Swift wants the album to be perceived as a coherent whole. So she doesn’t want to single out a song. That would be the artistic reason. There could also be a commercial one: She wants to avoid any chart competition with Beyoncé, whose album “Cowboy Carter” is only a few weeks old.

Of course as a stream and download. But also physically – in several variations. Swift is pop music’s greatest packaging artist. The previous album “Midnights” was available in 35 versions. Of the 7.1 million copies sold of Midnights in the US alone, 2.5 million were physical copies, which is huge. “TTPD” will now be released in four versions as a CD, colored LP and music cassette. Compared to the standard edition, each one has a bonus track.

She has now released eleven albums. “TTPD” is the fourth original album since 2020. Back then, “Folklore” and “Evermore” were released a few months apart. “Midnights” came out in 2022. There are still two albums left in her re-recording project “Taylor’s Version”, in which she re-records her early records.