Taylor Swift has revealed that her her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, will be released on October 3.
The pop superstar, 35, appeared Wednesday night on New Heights, the podcast her boyfriend Travis Kelce co-hosts with his brother, Jason. More than 1.3m viewers tuned in to watch the YouTube version of the podcast which ran for almost an hour and 45 minutes.
During the wide-ranging conversation Swift discussed her relationship with Kelce and her much-anticipated new album, explaining that the 12 songs were inspired by her experiences during her record-breaking Eras Tour. She also revealed that the album would feature a collaboration with fellow pop star Sabrina Carpenter.
“This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and and vibrant,” she said. “It just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life. That effervescence has come through on this record, and like, as [Kelce] said... bangers.”
She added that the album,will stand alone without bonus tracks, confirming: “There's no other songs coming.”
“It's not like The Tortured Poets Department where I was like: ‘Here's a data dump of everything I thought or felt in two or three years. Here’s 31 songs.’ This is 12,” she said. “There's not a 13th, there's not a 14th, there's not other ones coming.”
Swift’s decision comes after she received some criticism for the lengthy tracklists of recent albums such as last year’s The Tortured Poets Department, the “anthology” edition of which ran for 35 songs, including four acoustic versions.
“This is the record I've been wanting to make for a very long time,” the Grammy winner said. “Every single song is on this album for hundreds of reasons, you know? You couldn't take one out and it be the same album. You couldn't add one and it be the same album. It's just right.
“That focus and that kind of discipline with creating an album, and keeping the bar really high is something I've been wanting to do for a very long time,” she said.
Travis called the album “upbeat”, noting its difference in tone to Tortured Poets. “Life is more upbeat,” Swift responded, smiling at him.
Swift noted that she tends to write “lots and lots of music”, which could make it tempting to try and include as much as possible on a record.
“But oftentimes... I wanted to do an album that was so focused on quality and on the theme, and everything fitting together like a perfect puzzle, that these 12 songs for my 12th album, I feel like we achieved that, and I’m really happy about that.”
The Tortured Poets Department smashed two streaming records on Spotify, achieving 300 million plays in one day and one billion over five days, and also made her the first artist in history to secure the top 14 spots on the Billboard Hot 100.
She holds the record for most No 1 albums in the US by a female artist in history, and is also the first artist ever to have won the Grammy for Album of the Year four times.
Earlier in the episode, Swift reflected on how Travis wooed her, joking: “This podcast got me a boyfriend, ever since Travis decided to use it as his personal dating app about two years ago.”
She added that when they first spoke, she realized “he's the good kind of crazy.”
Travis famously sang Swift’s praises on his podcast before the pair met, while admitting he was disappointed they hadn’t met when he attended one of her concerts.
She said the clip, which went viral, felt almost like “he was standing outside of my apartment, holding a boom box saying, 'I want to go on a date with you'”.
This was exactly the moment she had “been writing songs about, wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager”, she said.
“I knew that he wasn't crazy the first couple of times that we talked,” she continued. “I was just like, he's truly getting to know me in a way that's very natural, very pure, very normal. Just the way that he could make me laugh so immediately about normal things. Travis is a vibe booster in everyone's life that he's in. He's like a human exclamation point.”
The track list for The Life of a Showgirl is as follows:
- “The Fate of Ophelia”
- “Elizabeth Taylor”
- “Opalite”
- “Father Figure”
- “Eldest Daughter”
- “Ruin the Friendship”
- “Actually Romantic”
- “Wi$h Li$t”
- “Wood’
- “Cancelled!”
- “Honey”
- “The Life of a Showgirl (featuring Sabrina Carpenter)”
The album was produced by Swift with Max Martin and Shellback, with whom Swift has previously collaborated on albums including 2012’s Red, 2014’s 1989 and 2017’s Reputation.
She described Swedish pop svengali Martin as her “mentor” and noted how he and Shellback had helped craft some of her biggest hits, from “We Are Never Getting Back Together”, “22”, “Shake It Off”, “Blank Space”, “Style” and “Delicate”.
“We’ve made songs that I am so proud of, and so basically we’ve never actually made an album before where it’s just the three of us,” she said.
“It felt like catching lightning in a bottle, honestly.”
She revealed that Martin attended one of her Eras shows in Stockholm where she told him she wanted to make an album that made her as proud as the Eras tour, “and for the same reasons”.
“He was like, ‘Do you understand what kind of pressure that is,’” she recalled, laughing.
Swift first announced her new record in a preview clip from the episode posted earlier this week. The album is now available for pre-order and will be shipped before October 13, according to Swift’s website.
The multi Grammy-winning pop star’s previous album was The Tortured Poets Department, released in 2024. In the same year, she ended her Eras Tour, which sold tickets worth an estimated $2.2 billion (£1.6bn) in its nearly two-year run, making it the highest-grossing tour of all time for two years in a row.
She has not yet mentioned whether she plans to tour the new album.
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