The Tortured Poets Department

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Tortured Poets Department was named aloud for the first time on the 4th of February 2024. Taylor Swift stood on stage at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, accepting Best Pop Vocal Album for Midnights, and used her speech to reveal it as the title of her eleventh studio album. The announcement came well before any song was released.

  Less than two weeks later, at an Eras concert in Melbourne, she told the crowd that writing the record had been a "lifeline" for her.

  Why would a singer at the height of her fame need a lifeline? What was she writing about, and who was she writing to? Why did critics split so sharply in the first days after release? And how did a record that some reviewers found overwrought end up breaking sales records?

  45168

• 2. Written on Tour

  ›

  In March 2023, Swift opened the Eras Tour, a concert run conceived as a retrospective tribute to every album in her catalogue. It became the first concert tour to gross $1 billion. Its success lifted her fame to unprecedented levels and drew the attention of scholars in marketing, economics and sociology.

  Swift did not wait for the tour to end before writing again. She began her eleventh album immediately after finishing her tenth, Midnights, which came out in 2022. She recorded the new songs with her longtime collaborators, the producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, during the American leg of the tour.

  Throughout 2023, her private life was a public subject. Fans and the press reported routinely on the end of her six-year relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn. They also discussed an alleged brief romantic link with the musician Matty Healy, and a new relationship with the American football player Travis Kelce. That turbulence is the backdrop to the record that followed.

  By Swift's own account, the finished album took two years to complete.

  32228

• 3. Chairman of the Department

  ›

  At the end of the album's packaging sits a self-written epilogue in which Swift casts herself as the "Chairman of the Tortured Poets Department." In social media posts she described the album as a record of "a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time," one that was "both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure."

  Some critics heard in the title a claim to a very long lineage. They traced poetry about lost love and self-torment back to Catullus and Sappho in ancient times, then to the medieval Petrarch, and on to the European "poète maudit" figures Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.

  The popular-culture academic Eloise Faichney offered a more modern comparison. She argued that the mix of casual language and formal poetic tradition resembles Instapoetry, the form that millennials, especially women, use to share their experiences on social media.

  Swift plays with the archetype herself in the title song, which describes an impending heartbreak between two musicians. There she tells her romantic interest that she is not Patti Smith and he is not Dylan Thomas. The line claims the "tortured poet" label and pushes it away in the same breath. A commentator named Burt wrote that the title did not make Swift a "print-based poet" but did show her skill at placing evocative lyrics inside pop songs.

  The missing apostrophe in the title set off a grammar debate in the press. Literary scholars judged it correct. In their reading, Swift uses "Tortured Poets" as an attributive noun, as in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, rather than as a possessive.

  The visuals carried the same mood. Photographer Beth Garrabrant shot the standard cover, a black-and-white glamour image of Swift lying on a bed in black loungewear, including a see-through Yves Saint Laurent tank top and The Row boy shorts. The English-literature scholar Emily J. Orlando likened her downcast pose in the booklet photographs to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings of the poet Elizabeth Siddal. Media outlets called the look gothic and dark academia.

  Brands, organizations, sports teams and franchises parodied both the cover and the title, and the images fed a flood of internet memes.

  828616265

• 4. Heartbreak and Fame

  ›

  Sixteen songs make up the standard edition. Swift wrote two of them alone, "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" and "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" Eight were co-written with Antonoff and five with Dessner. The rapper and singer Post Malone is featured on and co-wrote "Fortnight," and the musician Florence Welch is featured on "Florida!!!"

  The epilogue in the packaging lays out the story in two steps. A long-term relationship ends, and a short-lived rebound fling begins and then ends painfully. The songs add a third thread, which is the pressure of fame.

  The first thread is the end of the long relationship. In "So Long, London," Swift's narrator says goodbye to an ex-partner and to their romance in London. She resents that the lost love wasted her youth and that her attempts to rescue it failed. In "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys," she stays in denial that the relationship can still be saved.

  The fling comes next. "Fortnight" follows a two-week romance full of jealousy and murderous thoughts. "Fresh Out the Slammer" likens the old romance to a suffocating prison and shows the narrator escaping the moment it ends, to join an old flame. In "Down Bad," she compares the feelings of a short-lived infatuation to being abducted by an extraterrestrial being.

  "Guilty as Sin?" explores her longing to be intimate with another man while trapped in an unhappy relationship, and the guilt that follows. "But Daddy I Love Him" declares her devotion to a new love. In "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)," she is determined to bring out the sweet nature of a problematic man, until she realizes at the end that she cannot.

  Two songs handle the painful ending. In "Loml," the narrator is devastated by a "con-man" who falsely promised her marriage and children and then abandoned her. In "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived," she turns her anger on a man who ghosted her and "didn't measure up in any measure of a man."

  The music critic Ann Powers summarized the album as a novel-like collection of songs about "emotional violence" imposed on women by their male lovers and by themselves. She added that the lyrical details showed Swift at her most vulnerable and at her most ruthless. The imagery throughout is grim, with death, murder, prison, mental health spirals, narcotics and alcoholism.

  Fame is the third theme. These songs deal with how she coped with heartbreak while performing in the public eye, and they carry self-aware and sometimes self-deprecating humor. She confronts detractors, music-industry executives, the press and her fans.

  "But Daddy I Love Him" is set in a religious small town. In it, she criticizes anyone who disapproves of her romance with a troublesome man who may blemish her good-girl image. Several analyses read it as a message to fans not to interfere in her private life, because of their public outcry over the alleged fling with Healy, who was unpopular.

  Southern Gothic melodrama runs through "Florida!!!," "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" and "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)." "Florida!!!" is an escapist tale of fleeing to Florida to reinvent her identity and forget past wrongdoings. "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" channels rage and resentment toward the culture she was raised in, and alludes to her success as a teenager.

  In "I Can Do It with a Broken Heart," the narrator says she can still put on a show despite the depression of being abandoned. "The Alchemy," the penultimate track, is the outlier: a burgeoning, triumphant romance told through American football metaphors. The closing track, "Clara Bow," is named for the 1920s silent-film actress and explores how women in the music industry are repeatedly seen as replacements for the one before.

  1718263324

• 5. Myth and Literature

  ›

  The Anthology adds 15 songs to the 16 of the standard edition. Swift wrote three of them alone, "The Black Dog," "Peter" and "The Manuscript." Ten were written with Dessner and three with Antonoff. They continue the heartbreak but are less directly autobiographical, and they carry feeling through metaphor and character studies built from literary sources.

  English folklore supplies two of the songs. "The Black Dog" references both a London pub and the mythical black dog. Swift's narrator is devastated to learn that her ex-lover is seducing another woman at that pub. She ends by comparing his act of abandoning her to a dog with its tail between its legs.

  "The Albatross" borrows its central image from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1789 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The narrator compares herself to the albatross, both a sign of danger and an agent of rescue, and shifts from third person to first in the final chorus. The literature academic Matthew J. A. Green noted Gothic influences in both songs. The philosopher Georgie Mills observed that the lyrics can be read as a warning to someone who wronged her or as a caution for a potential partner.

  The ancient Greek princess Cassandra gives her name to another song. Apollo cursed her so that nobody would believe her prophecies. Swift's version departs from the myth, since the townsfolk murder Cassandra for her foresights instead of merely ignoring her. Burt wrote that the song draws on Homer and Virgil. As in "The Albatross," the storytelling moves between first and third person.

  In "The Prophecy," the narrator pleads with a higher being to change her destiny of loneliness and begs for a soulmate. Mills linked its prophecy theme to Cassandra and Oedipus, and heard biblical imagery of Eve being cursed in the lyrics.

  Two more songs lean on novels and plays. "Peter" is based on J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and is told by Wendy Darling, who waits by the window for the day Peter grows up and returns. In the bridge, she admits she has tried in vain, begs him to forgive her and extinguishes the candlelight.

  "The Bolter" was inspired by Nancy Mitford's 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love. Its title character is a woman who lives at society's margin and looks for love anywhere and in anyone. Swift's narrator is endearing and mischievous, takes pleasure in seducing bad men she calls "trophy hunters," and escapes them at every turn.

  Other songs turn back to Swift's own life. In "How Did It End?," the narrator wrestles with the anguish of a failed relationship and with how public interest in her private life distorts reality and feeds gossip. In "I Hate It Here," she daydreams about an idealized past of secret gardens, lunar valleys and gentle people, then admits that nostalgia is a trap. "Thank You Aimee" is a sarcastic attack on a high-school bully. The narrator thanks the bully for making her stronger and says she has changed the name so that the bully cannot enjoy the attention.

  "The Manuscript" closes the collection. It revisits a long-gone relationship with an older man, once painful and now remembered with maturity and acceptance. The final line is "The story isn't mine anymore." Mills read this as a nod to the "death of the author": by giving up ownership of her stories, Swift lets her audience build and own theirs, which makes her a "modern-day Homer" and her songs folktales.

  33226517

• 6. Two Sound Worlds

  ›

  Electric Lady Studios in New York City and Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles hosted Swift's sessions with Antonoff. Her work with Dessner took place at Long Pond Studios in the Hudson Valley. A few tracks traveled further. "Fresh Out the Slammer," "Florida!!!" and "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" were also recorded at Esplanade Studios in New Orleans. "Florida!!!" was also recorded at Miloco Studios in London, and "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)" at Rue Boyer Studio A in Paris.

  On tracks co-produced with Antonoff, his bandmates from Bleachers played from their own studios. Zem Audu and Evan Smith took synthesizers, Michael Riddleberger and Sean Hutchinson took drums and percussion, and Mikey Freedom Hart played guitars and keyboards. Laura Sisk recorded Swift's vocals at Electric Lady, and Christopher Rowe recorded them at Prime Recording Studio in Nashville. The London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Robert Ames, supplied strings for "Clara Bow" and for nine tracks on The Anthology.

  The overall sound is minimalist. The songs keep familiar Swift habits: verse-chorus form, mostly major keys, common time, one-note verse melodies that build tension toward more tuneful choruses, and syncopated rhythms. Critics heard country music in the song structures. Jon Pareles of The New York Times described a "choppy pre-chorus, or chorus, that arrives in two-syllable bursts," which brings a "hip-hop percussiveness." Swift sings mostly in the lower part of her range, in a rap-like, conversational delivery. The music professor Samuel Murray noted her recitative style.

  Antonoff and Dessner shaped two distinct soundscapes. Antonoff's synthesizer-based approach gives the standard edition its mid-tempo synth-pop, with sustained pads and bass, electronic pulses and sparse programmed drum machine beats. Critics said it recalls Midnights and the 2014 album 1989, but is more muted and less danceable. Dessner's piano and guitar arrangements give The Anthology its mellow folk-pop and chamber-pop ballads, which critics compared to the two 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore.

  The standard edition opens with five tracks of muted synth-pop: "Fortnight," "The Tortured Poets Department," "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys," "Down Bad" and "So Long, London." The first three draw on 1980s pop synth textures. "Down Bad" has R&B inflections, and "So Long, London" begins with vocal harmonies like a cathedral choir before moving into trembling, fast-paced synths.

  The next six tracks lean on country twang. "But Daddy I Love Him" blends country, folk rock and electropop, with amplified snare drums and Swift's full upper register. "Fresh Out the Slammer" has a reverbed electric guitar that evokes Americana. "Florida!!!" ends its choruses with a deep, tremolo electric guitar and sits in indie rock and arena rock. "Guilty as Sin?" draws on 1990s soft rock. "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" resembles orchestral pop, with galloping synth sequences and grainy Moog bass. "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)" uses sparse tremolo guitars and percussion that sounds like gunshots, evoking the Wild West.

  The rest of the standard edition ranges widely. "Loml" is a minimalist piano ballad that builds with strings toward the end. "I Can Do It with a Broken Heart" sets frantic synth arpeggiators over a disco-pop pulse. "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived" starts as a piano ballad and climbs to a climax of distorted vocals and crescendoing orchestral strings. "Clara Bow" pairs airy, staccato strings with two basses, one holding the tonic and one harmonizing.

  The Anthology is more uniform. It holds five piano ballads, two piano-led ballads and five fingerpicked guitar ballads. Only a few tracks break the pattern. "Imgonnagetyouback" has synth-pop production and R&B-influenced vocals, and "So High School" evokes 1990s indie and alternative rock.

  423725399

• 7. Rollout and Records

  ›

  On the 5th of February 2024, the day after the Grammy announcement, Swift posted the cover and standard track list on social media and opened pre-orders for the first physical variant, titled "The Manuscript." At Eras shows in Australia and Singapore in February and March, she announced three more physical editions, each named for a bonus track: "The Bolter," "The Albatross" and "The Black Dog." A "Phantom Clear" collector's vinyl came through a partnership with Target.

  The promotion sent fans hunting for Easter eggs. On Apple Music, Swift curated five playlists of her earlier songs, inspired by the five stages of grief. Spotify built a pop-up library of curated articles at The Grove in Los Angeles. QR code murals in cities around the world led to unlisted YouTube shorts on her channel. Instagram added a countdown, Threads added shimmer effects to related hashtags, and iHeartRadio temporarily rebranded as "iHeartTaylor."

  The album leaked two days before release, and the phrase "Taylor Swift leak" was temporarily banned from searches on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. Physical and digital editions arrived on the 19th of April 2024 through Republic Records. The Anthology was a surprise, appearing on digital platforms two hours later. The first run included 19 physical variants: nine CDs, six vinyl LPs and four cassettes. Every physical copy carried a poem by the singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks, who is referenced in "Clara Bow."

  From May 2024, starting with the Paris shows, Swift rebuilt the Eras Tour set list to include a new act for this album, which she informally called "Female Rage the Musical." It used black-and-white graphics and Old Hollywood-inspired settings. She released live recordings from shows in Sweden, France and the United Kingdom as bonus tracks on limited-time digital albums, sold through her website only to customers in the United States. Acoustic versions came with five limited physical editions, and "first draft phone" demos with four limited digital ones. On the 29th of November 2024, The Anthology was released on vinyl and CD exclusively through Target in North America, with four acoustic bonus tracks.

  Two singles came from the album. "Fortnight" arrived on the 19th of April and debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100, Swift's seventh number-one debut and Post Malone's first. "I Can Do It with a Broken Heart" followed on the 2nd of July and spent 31 weeks on the chart, the album's longest run.

  The numbers broke records across streaming, physical sales and digital sales. On Spotify, the album set marks for the most streams in a single day, at 300 million, and in a single week. It was the first album to reach one billion streams in a week, doing so in five days. Within one week of release, it had amassed 1.76 billion streams worldwide. It was also the most-streamed album in a single day on Amazon Music, and the most-streamed pop album in a single day on Apple Music.

  Republic Records reported 4 million album-equivalent units in the first week. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said 5.6 million copies sold made it the global best-selling album of 2024. By August 2025, it had sold 11 million equivalent units worldwide.

  In the United States, the album accumulated 1.6 million album-equivalent units in four days. That included 700,000 vinyl LPs, the highest single-week vinyl sales of the digital era. Over six days it drew 799 million on-demand streams, beating the single-week streaming record held by Drake's Scorpion from 2018. The first-week tally on the Billboard 200 reached 2.61 million units, with 1.914 million pure copies, and it gave Swift her 14th number-one album, tying her with Jay-Z for the most among solo artists.

  All 31 songs from The Anthology debuted on the Billboard Hot 100. Swift set a record for a female artist with 32 chart entries in one week, counting "Cruel Summer." She became the first female artist with over 50 songs in the top 10 across her career, and the first artist to hold the top 14 spots at once, led by "Fortnight."

  The album spent 17 non-consecutive weeks at number one, the longest reign of her career. It was the first album by a female artist, and the third overall, to hold the top spot for its first 12 weeks. Its dominance pinned Billie Eilish's Hit Me Hard and Soft, the rapper ¥$'s Vultures 2 and Chappell Roan's The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess at number two. It topped the Billboard 200 Year-End chart of 2024 with 6.955 million units, including 3.491 million pure copies. In September 2025, the Recording Industry Association of America certified it eight-times platinum.

  Elsewhere, the pattern repeated. It was Swift's 14th number-one album in New Zealand and Canada, her 13th in Australia and her 12th in the United Kingdom, tying her with Madonna for the most number-one albums by a woman there. In New Zealand it was the first album to place nine songs in the singles top 10. In Canada it set the record for the biggest vinyl sales week in history. In Australia it set records for simultaneous entries in the singles top 10, top 50 and top 100.

  In the United Kingdom, it had the biggest sales week by any artist in seven years and the biggest vinyl week since 1994. It spent 11 weeks at number one, making it the first album by a non-British artist in the 21st century to pass 10 weeks. All four of those English-speaking countries named it the best-selling album of 2024.

  On the European continent it reached number one in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. In Spain it was the best seller of 2024, a first for a non-Spanish-speaking artist in the 21st century. In Brazil, 10 of its tracks debuted on the Brasil Hot 100, and The Anthology was certified diamond.

  8392100789

• 8. A Divided Verdict

  ›

  On Metacritic, the album earned a weighted average of 76 out of 100 from 24 critic scores, which the site labels "generally favorable reviews." The Anthology, scored separately, averaged 69 from six reviews. Secondary sources described the overall consensus as either positive or mixed.

  The admiring camp was large. Helen Brown of The Independent, Dan Cairns of The Times and Will Harris of Q were among those who called it one of Swift's most solid outputs. Chris Willman of Variety, Ed Power of the i and Kitty Empire of The Observer called it a quintessential Swift album. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian thought it held her wittiest lyrics, and Alex Hopper of American Songwriter wrote that her "confidence as an artist is at a peak."

  Many reviewers praised the emotional rawness. Lauren Webb of Clash described "a spell-binding, toxic, chaotic illustration" of deteriorating mental sanity. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone called the album "gloriously chaotic," and Willman found it "audacious, transfixing" and said it combined "cleverness with catharsis." Powers wrote that Swift showed a "lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself."

  The skeptics were just as pointed. Alex Hudson of Exclaim! claimed that many tracks "mistake verbosity for poetry." Olivia Horn of Pitchfork felt the lyrics tended "to smother rather than sting." Mary Siroky of Consequence found the style "outright bizarre" at times and read the album as self-parody. Lindsay Zoladz of The New York Times, Laura Molloy of NME and Tom Breihan of Stereogum called the Antonoff collaboration uninventive. Amanda Petrusich of The New Yorker preferred Dessner's contribution, which she called "gentler, more tender, and more surprising."

  Mary Kate Carr of The A.V. Club thought the album "perfectly good" but said it arrived when Swift had "nothing to prove," and an anonymous Paste review called it rushed and hollow. Other outlets singled out the Paste review as "scathing." Sumnima Kandangwa of the South China Morning Post suggested the writer hid their identity because Swifties "can become quite spirited" about defending their favourite singer. Sputnikmusic posted three ratings in a short span, each lower than the one before. Swift shared the positive reviews on her own social media, tagging their authors, which some read as an answer to Paste and other critics.

  Then journalists began questioning the reviews themselves. Jessica Karl of Bloomberg News argued that the sheer length of the album left reviewers staying up until dawn to publish, producing hasty takes, from the "exclamation-pointed digs" in Paste to the "instant classic" verdict from Rolling Stone. Nora Princiotti of The Ringer blamed the unexpected double-album release. Her colleague Nathan Hubbard, who called it Swift's most controversial release since Reputation in 2017, argued that some "cooler-than-thou" critics used her billionaire status to wave away the personal struggles she described. Journalists at The New York Times and Vox pointed to her heightened fame and media overexposure. Sinéad O'Sullivan of The New Yorker said Swift's albums hold layers of self-referential "lore," and that unfavorable reviews came from critics who ignored it or did not listen long enough.

  Some early critics took their words back. Chris Molanphy of Slate said it had become a "widely agreed point" that the album "grows on you," and that he liked it better than he had a week earlier. Oliver Darcy of CNN first found it overlong and unimpressive, in line with the mixed reception. A week later, after "more methodically touring through its subtleties and nuances," he declared it "one of Swift's best works yet." He argued that an album cannot be digested at "the speed of TikTok." People went further and called it Swift's "Most Important Album," judged "too soon."

  The honors followed. The album won an ARIA Music Award, a Premios Odeón and a Japan Gold Disc Award. At the 67th Annual Grammy Awards it received five nominations, including Album of the Year, the category Swift had been standing next to when she first spoke its title aloud.

  3711144451