The Tortured Poets Department is the eleventh studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on April 19, 2024, through Republic Records. It was expanded into a double album two hours after its release, subtitled The Anthology, containing a second volume of songs.

Swift began writing The Tortured Poets Department shortly after finishing her tenth studio album, Midnights (2022), and continued developing it during the Eras Tour in 2023. She conceived The Tortured Poets Department as an imperative songwriting project amidst the heightened fame and media scrutiny ensuing from the tour. The songs introspect on events from her public and private lives, detailing tumult and sorrow via motifs of self-awareness, mourning, anger, humor, and delusion. Produced with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the album is a minimalist synth-pop, folk-pop, and chamber pop effort with rock and country stylings. The composition is largely mid-tempo, driven by a mix of synthesizers and drum machines with piano and guitar.

The album broke various sales and streaming records. It achieved the highest single-day and single-week global streams for an album on Spotify and topped the charts in territories across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas, breaking chart records in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In the United States, The Tortured Poets Department debuted atop the Billboard 200 with first-week 2.6 million album-equivalent units, including 1.9 million pure sales, marking Swift's biggest sales week and record-extending seventh release to open with over a million units. Its songs made Swift the first artist to monopolize the first 14 positions of the Billboard Hot 100, with the lead single "Fortnight" at the top.

Although the majority of reviews were positive, praising Swift's cathartic songwriting for its emotional resonance and wit, The Tortured Poets Department polarized critics upon release, with some finding it overlong and lacking profundity. Subsequent assessments appreciated the album's musical and lyrical nuances that emerged upon further listens, and disputed the credibility of the initial critique for focusing on Swift's public image rather than artistic merit. Swift included songs from the album in the revamped set list of the Eras Tour, starting in May 2024.

Background and conception

Swift released her tenth studio album, Midnights, on October 21, 2022, to critical praise and commercial success. In 2023, she released two re-recorded albums, Speak Now (Taylor's Version) and 1989 (Taylor's Version), as part of her "Taylor's Version" re-recording project after a dispute over the ownership of her first six studio albums. Both re-recordings were released amidst Swift's sixth headlining concert tour, the Eras Tour. At the 66th Annual Grammy Awards on February 4, 2024, Swift won Best Pop Vocal Album and Album of the Year for Midnights. During her acceptance speech for the former category, she announced The Tortured Poets Department as a new original studio album that she had worked on since 2022. This announcement was met with surprise from her fans, who had anticipated her to announce the re-recording of her 2017 album, Reputation, based on her social media clues.

Swift began conceiving the album immediately after submitting Midnights to her record label, Republic Records, and continued working on it in secret throughout the U.S. leg of the Eras Tour in 2023. While she was creating the album, her dating life continued to be a widely covered topic in the press, who reported on Swift's relationships with Joe Alwyn, Matty Healy, and Travis Kelce. At the Eras Tour concerts in Melbourne in February 2024, Swift said that The Tortured Poets Department was a "lifeline" for her and an album that she "really needed" to make, reflecting on how it made her confirm that songwriting was an integral part of her life. In an Instagram post, Swift described the album 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".

Composition

Themes and lyrics

The standard edition consists of 16 songs; Swift wrote three of them herself and co-wrote the rest mostly with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. Post Malone featured on and co-wrote "Fortnight", and Florence and the Machine featured on "Florida!!!", which was co-written by the band's frontwoman Florence Welch. Swift produced all tracks with Antonoff and Dessner.

The album is rooted in personal songwriting, exploring Swift's introspections on the events in her private and public lives. She was inspired by her tumultuous relationships and the public perception of her celebrity to create lyrical narratives that were messy, unbridled, and unguarded, containing meta-references to her personal life through allusions and name-dropping. Heartbreak is the primary topic, expressed via themes such as delusion, anger, mourning, and death. While the lyrics evoke vulnerable and devastating sentiments, they also incorporate humor and hyperbole. Critics found them either self-aware or self-conscious. Swift considered the album a cathartic exercise and described the content as "fatalistic" with overarching themes of "longing, pining, lost dreams".

Critics characterized The Tortured Poets Department as a post-breakup album. Ann Powers wrote in NPR that throughout the record, "Swift is trying to work out how emotional violence occurs." In The Conversation, the music professor Samuel Murray opined that the album uses melodrama as a narrative device to "celebrate emotional vulnerability as she shares her innermost thoughts". Business Insider's Callie Ahlgrim described the album's content as Swift's "messiest, horniest, and funniest". In The Independent, Helen Brown suggested that Swift's songwriting draws on her country music roots to explore detail-heavy narratives. While some critics argued that the album is autobiographical in nature, Pitchfork's Shaad D'Souza argued that it straddles the confessional and the fictional storytelling.

Swift has stated she imagines the eponymous Tortured Poet's Department as a "government municipal building, where they study the behaviours and minds of poets and one of the stereotypical things about poets over the years is that people said they were crazy," and it appears in the "Fortnight" music video. This implies all the songs in the album happen in the same fictional universe, with each song presumably tied to the building's investigations in an anthology.

Production and music

Mainly produced by Swift and Antonoff, the album's standard portion is primarily synth-pop, with a mid-tempo production incorporating subdued synths and sparse drum machines. Critics found the production minimalist and compared this synth-based sonic approach to the sound of Midnights. PopMatters's Igor Bannikov described it as "simplistic, indie-ish, and almost muted", The Guardian's Alexis Petridis wrote that it additionally features "the glossy 80s-influenced pop-rock" of Swift's 2014 album 1989, and The Times' Will Hodgkinson described the album as an amalgam of synth-pop and 1980s power ballads. Swift mostly sings in her lower vocal register to deliver rap-like, conversational verses. As per Murray's analysis, the album uses some of Swift's familiar devices such as one-note melodies and recitative delivery with a conversational rhythm. The music is "downcast", departing from danceable pop, as per The Economist.

Several tracks feature a more stripped-down instrumentation, driven by piano or guitar, with stylings of varied genres; "But Daddy I Love Him" and "Guilty as Sin?" incorporate live drums and influences of country and rock, "Down Bad" evokes R&B in its dynamic shifts and cadences, "Fresh Out the Slammer" features Western-rock electric guitars, and "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)", "Florida!!!", and "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" experiments with Southern gothic. Tyler Foggart of The New Yorker dubbed The Tortured Poets Department a mix of dream pop and Southern gothic infused with some "country-ish vibes", while Josh Kurp of Uproxx thought that the album was genre-less.

The second part of the double album, subtitled The Anthology, mostly consists of chamber pop and folk-pop piano ballads. Swift and Dessner produced the majority of the second volume, which has an acoustic, folk-oriented sound instrumented by picked acoustic guitar, soft piano, and subtle synths, which critics likened to the sound of Swift's 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore. Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph argued that this mellower sound allows for more subtlety in the lyrics, which explore Swift's character studies ("Cassandra", "Peter", "Robin") and self-reflection ("The Albatross", "The Bolter", "I Look in People's Windows", "I Hate It Here").

Promotion and release

The lack of an apostrophe in the official title, as in The Tortured Poets' Department, was the subject of a debate over grammatical correctness. Scholars stated that Swift employed Tortured Poets as an attributive noun, as in the case with the 1989 drama film Dead Poets Society, and not as a possessive noun that warrants an apostrophe. The cover artwork, photographed by Beth Garrabrant, is a black-and-white glamor photo shot of Swift lying on a bed wearing black lingerie: a see-through top and high waist shorts, from the Row and Yves Saint Laurent. Both the artwork and title were parodied by numerous brands, organizations, sports teams, and franchises, and inspired numerous memes. Media outlets described the album's visual aesthetic as dark academia.

After the Grammy announcement, Swift revealed the standard track listing via social media on February 6, 2024. Swift announced four physical editions that were each titled after a corresponding bonus track: "The Manuscript", "The Bolter", "The Albatross", and "The Black Dog"; she announced the latter three editions during the Australian and Singaporean shows of the Eras Tour. She partnered with Target for an exclusive "Phantom Clear" collector's vinyl edition.

The album was promoted on digital platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, and Threads, prompting Swifties to search for Easter eggs. It included five Swift-curated Apple Music playlists containing her old songs inspired by the five stages of grief; a pop-up library of curated articles at The Grove, Los Angeles, hosted by Spotify; QR code murals in various cities worldwide that lead to unlisted YouTube shorts on Swift's channel; a countdown to the album's release revealed upon refreshing Swift's Instagram profile; and special shimmer effects on Threads posts tagged with hashtags related to Swift and the album. iHeartRadio and Sirius XM announced special programs with exclusive content from Swift to celebrate the album's release; the latter temporarily rebranded as "iHeartTaylor".

The Tortured Poets Department was released on April 19, 2024. A double album edition, subtitled The Anthology and containing 15 bonus tracks, was surprise-released digitally two hours later. Two days earlier, the standard edition of the album was leaked, which resulted in the phrase "Taylor Swift leak" being temporarily banned from searches on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). The Tortured Poets Department was available in 19 physical variants—nine CD, six vinyl, and four cassette variants, with deluxe CDs and cassettes being exclusive to Swift's official website. Physical copies of the album included an original poem by the American singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks. "Fortnight" was released as the lead single in conjunction with the album, accompanied by a music video. Universal Music released "I Can Do It with a Broken Heart" to Italian radio on July 2.

From May 2024, starting with the Paris shows in France, Swift revamped the set list of the Eras Tour to include songs from The Tortured Poets Department in a new act, which she informally described as "Female Rage the Musical".

Swift subsequently released the live versions as bonus tracks on the physical album via her website exclusively to US customers. Other limited CD editions included an acoustic version of either "But Daddy I Love Him", "Fortnight", "Fresh Out the Slammer", "Down Bad", or "Guilty as Sin?". Limited digital variants contained the first draft phone demo recordings of either "The Black Dog", "Cassandra", or "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?",; the Eras Tour live recordings of either "Loml", "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys", or "The Alchemy" / "Treacherous" from the Paris shows; or the Eras Tour live recordings of either "Guilty as Sin?", "Peter", or "How Did It End?" from the Stockholm shows. The release of limited-edition bonus-track versions was a way for Swift and her fans to maintain the album's number-one position on the charts, a method Swift and other artists have previously utilized to boost album sales and chart positions.

Critical reception

Reviews

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	7.5/10
Metacritic	76/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Clash	8/10
The Daily Telegraph
The Guardian
The Independent
NME
Pitchfork	6.6/10
Rolling Stone
Slant Magazine
The Times

Publications described the critical consensus upon release as positive or mixed. According to the review aggregator Metacritic, The Tortured Poets Department received "generally favorable reviews" based on a weighted average score of 76 out of 100 from 24 critic scores. Its second part, The Anthology, scored 69 from six critic scores.

A number of critics regarded the album a landmark in Swift's discography. Reviews from The Independent's Helen Brown, The Arts Desk's Ellie Roberts, The Times' Dan Cairns, PopMatters's Jeffrey Davies, and Will Harris of Q praised the album as one of Swift's most solid outputs, considering the musical composition, vocal stylings and lyrical tonality as ambitious and tastefully experimental. Others, including Variety's Chris Willman, the i's Ed Power, and The Observer's Kitty Empire, called it a quintessential Swift album.

Swift's songwriting was a source of compliment. The Line of Best Fit's Paul Bridgewater dubbed it her most cohesive body of work to-date, finding the music sophisticated and the lyricism symbolic. To Ludovic Hunter-Tilney of the Financial Times, the album is a stylistic evolution for Swift, with writing that marks a "characteristically appealing turn" into moody melodrama. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian and Alex Hopper of American Songwriter thought that the album has Swift's wittiest lyrics, featuring nuanced musical choices that show Swift is "willing to take risks in a risk-averse era for pop" and "constantly evolving and pushing her limits", respectively. In a more measured review, Olivia Horn of Pitchfork felt the lyrics did not "distill an overarching emotional truth, tending to smother rather than sting." Others, such as The New York Times' Lindsay Zoladz, Slant Magazine's Jonathan Keefe, and Exclaim!'s Alex Hudson, described some lyrics as weak and overwritten; Hudson claimed that many of its tracks "mistake verbosity for poetry".

The tumultuous mood and unconstrained emotion of the lyrics were also highlighted. Multiple reviews complimented the album's heavy, unfiltered emotion; Clash's Lauren Webb described it as "a spell-binding, toxic, chaotic illustration" of deteriorating mental sanity. Powers opined that The Tortured Poets Department shows Swift's newfound freedom, with a "lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself". In a similar perspective, rave reviews from Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield and Variety's Chris Willman described the album as Swift's "gloriously chaotic" and "audacious, transfixing" project, respectively. To Willman, the album combines "cleverness with catharsis". Consequence's Mary Siroky, on the other hand, found this style of lyricism jarring and "outright bizarre" at times, and felt the album was an attempt at self-parody rather than a showcase of Swift's songwriting acumen.

Many critics, including Zoladz, NME's Laura Molloy, and Stereogum's Tom Breihan, argued that Swift and Antonoff's collaboration on The Tortured Poets Department was uninventive due to a sonic similarity to their past collaborations. The New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich rather favored Dessner's input to the album as "gentler, more tender, and more surprising". Horn and the BBC's Mark Savage felt the melodies were sonically monotonous and "staid", but others argued that the minimalistic approach complemented Swift's hyper-personal lyrics; Hopper opined that "Swift's confidence as an artist is at a peak" with The Tortured Poets Department. According to Mary Kate Carr of The A.V. Club, the album is "perfectly good" but arrived at a time when Swift has "nothing to prove" anymore, resulting in a stagnant point in her artistry; this idea was also shared by an anonymous, negative Paste review that criticized the album as rushed, hollow, and unrelatable.

Post-review commentary

Various peer journalists and columnists cross-examined the album's critical reception. Publications considered The Tortured Poets Department a polarizing album; The Ringer's Nathan Hubbard deemed it Swift's most controversial release since Reputation (2017). Journalists from The New York Times and Vox attributed this phenomenon to Swift's heightened fame and associated media "overexposure" between 2020 and 2024, including eight album releases, the influential Eras Tour, and the relationship with Travis Kelce. Paste's anonymous review was singled out by other publications as "scathing"; Sumnima Kandangwa of the South China Morning Post opined that they hid their reviewer's identity because Swifties "can become quite spirited when it comes to protecting their favourite singer". The album's Pitchfork score is Swift's lowest from the website. Sputnikmusic published reviews with three different ratings in a short period of time, each lower than the one before; Minh Anh of L'Officiel found this to be a confusing way to rate music. Swift shared the album's positive reviews on her social media, tagging the respective authors, which some considered as a response to Paste and other unfavorable reviews.

A number of commentators opined that the initial reviews demonstrated a flawed approach of mainstream music criticism. Bloomberg News' Jessica Karl wrote that the "lengthy" duration of the album made the reviewers "[stay] up until dawn to finish listening to an album" to publish, contributing to some reviews that were hasty, criticizing both the "exclamation-pointed digs" at Swift in Paste and the "instant classic" review by Rolling Stone. In The Ringer, Nora Princiotti attributed the polarizing reviews to the unexpected double album release, and Nathan Hubbard argued that some "cooler-than-thou" critics from sites like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Paste used Swift's billionaire status to downplay the personal issues she detailed in the album. Karl opined that some "reputable publications" catered gossip instead of a serious artistic analysis, while Anh highlighted that reviews mentioned aspects of Swift's public image instead of focusing on the music. The New Yorker's Sinéad O'Sullivan asserted that Swift's albums contain multiple layers of self-referential "lore", writing that the unfavorable reviews were due to critics not taking that into account or not allotting enough listening time.

Some early critics of the album recanted and declared they were "hasty" in reviewing it, as per Slate's Chris Molanphy, who opined it has become a "widely agreed point" in later critical commentary that The Tortured Poets Department "grows on you" after more listens; Molanphy stated he liked the album better than he did a week before. CNN's Oliver Darcy said he had judged The Tortured Poets Department quickly, stating that he reviewed it keeping in the mind its mixed critical reception, and found the album overlong and unimpressive in agreement with other critics, but a week later, "after spending more time with the two-hour sonic feast, more methodically touring through its subtleties and nuances, I am ready to declare that it is one of Swift's best works yet." Darcy opined that the album cannot be fully digested at "the speed of TikTok", and criticized reviewers who do not let music albums "marinate" and instead expect "instant satisfaction".

Commercial performance

The Tortured Poets Department broke numerous consumption records, leading The Guardian to comment that it "cemented Swift as the biggest pop star this century by many metrics". On Spotify, it became the most pre-saved album of all time; the most streamed album in a single day, surpassing 200 million and then 300 million streams and breaking the all-time record previously held by Swift's Midnights; and the first album to accumulate one billion streams in a single week, doing so in five days. The album also became the most streamed album in a single day on Amazon Music and the most streamed pop album in a single day on Apple Music. It amassed 1.76 billion streams globally within its first week of availability, an all-time record. Republic Records reported global first-week consumption of four million units.

In the United States, according to Billboard, the album accumulated 1.6 million album-equivalent units in four days, selling 700,000 vinyl LPs to break the record for the highest single-week vinyl sales previously held by Swift's 1989 (Taylor's Version) (2023). It broke the single-week streaming record previously held by Drake's Scorpion (2018), amassing 799 million on-demand streams in six days. After a full week of availability, The Tortured Poets Department debuted atop the Billboard 200 with 2.61 million units, including 1.914 million pure copies and 891.34 million on-demand streams. It became Swift's 14th number-one album, tying her with Jay-Z for the most chart toppers among soloists. The album also registered the second-largest week by overall units and the third-largest week by pure sales in Billboard history. It spent its first 10 weeks atop the Billboard 200, becoming the fifth album in history to do so. All 31 songs from The Anthology debuted on the Billboard Hot 100, occupying the entire top 14 simultaneously for the first time in chart history. Swift set the record for most simultaneous entries by a female artist (32) and became the first woman to surpass 50 career top-10 songs. It spent 11 consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, making it the first female album since Whitney Houston's Whitney (1986) to do so.

The Tortured Poets Department broke chart records elsewhere. In Germany, it recorded the largest streaming day for an album and debuted atop the chart with the highest sales week for an international solo artist in seven years. In the United Kingdom, it became the fastest-selling album by any artist in seven years and by a non-British artist in 18 years, selling 270,000 units in its first week. As Swift's 12th number-one album on the UK Albums Chart, it tied her with Madonna for the most chart-toppers among female artists. It became the United Kingdom's fastest-selling vinyl album since 1994, surpassing the previous record held by Midnights, and spent eight weeks at number one. On the Australian ARIA Charts, The Tortured Poets Department became Swift's 13th number-one album, a record among female artists; its songs set records for the most simultaneous entries by a single artist in the top 10 (10), top 50 (29), and top 100 (31) of the singles chart. Debuting atop the Canadian Albums Chart as Swift's 14th consecutive chart topper, the album registered the highest single-week vinyl sales and streaming figures in chart history. Ten tracks from the album debuted on the Billboard Brasil Hot 100.

Track listing

Notes

• signifies a vocal producer
• "Loml" and "Imgonnagetyouback" are stylized in all lowercase.
• "Thank You Aimee" is stylized as "thanK you aIMee".
• Physical editions of the standard album include either "The Black Dog", "The Albatross", "The Bolter" or "The Manuscript" as a bonus track.

Personnel

Musicians

Technical

Charts

Certifications

Certifications for The Tortured Poets Department

Region	Certification	Certified units/sales
Australia (ARIA)	Platinum	70,000
Austria (IFPI Austria)	Gold	7,500
Denmark (IFPI Danmark)	Platinum	20,000
France (SNEP)	Platinum	100,000
Germany (BVMI)	Gold	75,000
Italy (FIMI)	Gold	25,000
New Zealand (RMNZ)	2× Platinum	30,000
Poland (ZPAV)	Platinum	20,000
Portugal (AFP)	Gold	3,500
Spain (PROMUSICAE)	Platinum	40,000
Switzerland (IFPI Switzerland)	Gold	10,000
United Kingdom (BPI)	Platinum	300,000
Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.

Release history

The Tortured Poets Department release history

Region	Date	Format(s)	Edition(s)	Label	Ref.
Various	April 19, 2024	Digital download streaming	Standard	Republic
		Cassette CD vinyl LP	The Black Dog The Albatross The Bolter The Manuscript
		Digital download streaming	The Anthology
United States		CD vinyl LP	Target-exclusive
Japan	April 20, 2024	CD	The Manuscript	Universal Japan
	May 17, 2024		The Black Dog The Albatross The Bolter