Poetic revenge Key lessons from Swift's surprise double album
The Guardian|April 20, 2024
It's a surprise double-album epic At 7am yesterday Swift announced the surprise release of the second half of the album she had released hours earlier with 15 more songs:
Laura Snapes
Poetic revenge Key lessons from Swift's surprise double album

"The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album," she wrote. "I'd written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you." These are primarily quieter, less poppy songs co-written with the National's Aaron Dessner, rather than the album's other key collaborator, Jack Antonoff. And the tone is far closer to her 2020 lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore than the muted pop boom of the album's first half.

Despite writing on Instagram that "this period of the author's life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up", at least one of these songs refers to a very dated contretemps- the stylising of "thank you alMee" highlights the word "Kim" and the song's lyrics about a fake-tanned tormentor hint heavily at Kim Kardashian, with whom she first clashed in 2016.

She's rebuking the public for the first time

Swift has been engaging with public perceptions of her as far back as 2010's Speak Now but she had never openly condemned her listeners before her new album.

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