It’s been a very long process, filled with TikTok clips, cryptic hints, fan theories, and even leaks, but Taylor Swift has finally released Midnights.
The pop superstar’s 10th studio album was released today, Friday, October 21st following several months of anticipation.
Swift first confirmed Midnights onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards back in August. She would go on to describe the album as “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.”
“This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams,” she explained. “The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching – hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes 12 … we’ll meet ourselves.”
Swift then teased fans with the Midnights Mayhem With Me TikTok series, dropping title tracks one at a time at midnight.
She delved deeper into only a handful of tracks. Of ‘Snow on the Beach’, she said it was “about falling in love with someone at the same time that they’re falling in love with you, sort of in this sort of cataclysmic, fated moment where you realise someone feels exactly the same way that you feel.”
She enthusiastically praised her ‘Snow on the Beach’ collaborator Lana Del Rey, revealing she was “such a massive fan.”
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She also discussed in more detail ‘Lavender Haze’, revealing that she discovered the phrase while watching Mad Men. “I looked it up because I thought it sounded cool, and it turns out that it’s a common phrase used in the fifties where they would just describe being in love,” she said. “Like, if you were in the lavender haze, you were in that all-encompassing love glow… and I thought that was really beautiful.”
And of ‘Anti-Hero’, she claimed it was one of her “favourite songs” she’s “ever written.” The remaining tracks have been left up to the imagination, and you can listen to the full album below.
Despite being released at the end of October, Midnights is likely to become one of the year’s biggest-selling albums.
Taylor Swift’s Midnights is out now.
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