Catch the latest buzz on Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department – live updates: Hear What critics and Fans Have to Say!

Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department – live updates: What critics and fans are saying
Taylor Swift has released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Society, revealing just three hours after it dropped that it is a surprise double album.

The pop titan’s latest record, announced earlier this year when she won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album (Midnights),was released overnight on Friday 19 April and reportedly caused a spike in Spotify outages.

Physical copies of the LP feature a prologue/poem written by legendary Fleetwood Mac star and solo singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks, a longtime champion of Swift, and an epilogue written by Swift herself.

In a five-star review of the album, The Independent’s critic Helen Brown praised the “playful narratives” and “hooks like anchors”.

“In keeping with the literary (if ungrammatical) album title, Swift is on her most piercingly polysyllabic form here,” she wrote.

Fans have been surprised that many songs on the album seem to take aim at Swift’s ex Matty Healy, whom she briefly dated last year, instead of her boyfriend of six years Joe Alwyn, whom she was reported to have parted ways with around April 2023.

When announcing the release of her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift described it as “an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure”.

“This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed,” she wrote on Instagram.

“And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it,” Swift added.

“And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.”

When announcing the release of her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift described it as “an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure”.

“This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed,” she wrote on Instagram.

“And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it,” Swift added.

“And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.”