Taylor Swift’s new album is now out! Midnights, the 32-year-old singer’s 10th studio album, was finally released as the clock struck midnight on the East Coast!
The singer turned to Instagram shortly after the album’s release to express her thanks to one of her primary collaborators, Jack Antonoff.
“Midnights is a wild ride of an album and I couldn’t be happier that my co pilot on this adventure was @jackantonoff. He’s my friend for life (presumptuous I know but I stand by it) and we’ve been making music together for nearly a decade HOWEVER… this is our first album we’ve done with just the two of us as main collaborators,” she wrote, alongside a slideshow of photos of herself and the Bleachers frontman.
“We’d been toying with ideas and had written a few things we loved, but Midnights actually really coalesced and flowed out of us when our partners (both actors) did a film together in Panama,” she continued. “Jack and I found ourselves back in New York, alone, recording every night, staying up late and exploring old memories and midnights past.”
“Midnights is a collage of intensity, highs and lows and ebbs and flows. Life can be dark, starry, cloudy, terrifying, electrifying, hot, cold, romantic or lonely,” she concluded.
Swift also discussed her new album in an interview with New Music Daily on Apple Music. Swift explained in the interview, which will be released on Friday, that “one of the themes about ‘Midnights’ is how you feel in the middle of the night and that can be intense self-hatred you go through these very polarizing emotions when you’re up late at night and your brain just spirals, it can spiral downward or it can spiral way up and you can just be really feeling yourself.”
Swift also discussed her new single “Karma,” saying it was “written from a perspective of feeling like really happy really proud of the way your life is, feeling like this must be a reward for doing stuff right.”
“It’s a song that I really love because I think we all need some of those moments, you know? We can’t just be beating ourselves up all the time. You have to have these moments where you’re like, ‘You know what? Karma is my boyfriend and that’s it.'”
Swift initially revealed the 13-track album in August, when accepting the Video of the Year award at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards.
Swift teased the upcoming music videos she’s prepared for the Midnights era ahead of the highly anticipated release. “Here’s the teaser trailer for the videos I’ve made for Midnights. Thank you @amazonmusic for premiering this, the first video for Anti-Hero will be out tomorrow at 8am ET. And Midnights will be here SO SOON!!!”
Swift swiftly had fans talking about the album in her first Instagram post, disclosing the release date, Oct. 21, which also happened to be Kim Kardashian’s 42nd birthday.
“We lie awake in love and in fear, in turmoil and in tears. We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren’t — right this minute — about to make some fateful life-altering mistake,” she wrote in her album announcement.
“This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. 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 twelve… we’ll meet ourselves.”
Swift continued the album promo by hosting Midnights Mayhem With Me, in which she unveiled the song’s titles one by one. There was “Lavender Haze,” which she teased was about her relationship with Joe Alwyn, “Snow On the Beach,” a song about falling in love and featuring Lana Del Rey, and “Anti-Hero,” which Swift called “a real guided tour throughout all the things I tend to hate about myself.”
Spotify later disclosed some of the album’s lyrics. Co-writers were eventually revealed, showing collaborations with Zoe Kravitz, Jack Antonoff, and Alwyn under his pen name, William Bowery.
Midnights is now available.