ADVERTISEMENT TS12 is a go.
Following intense speculation over the last 24 hours, Taylor Swift has announced her 12th studio album, titled ‘The Life of a Showgirl’.
Swift announced the album on her website shortly after a countdown timer expired at 12:12am ET (06:12 CET) this morning.
This comes after Taylor Nation – an official branch of the pop superstar’s marketing team – posted a TikTok slide show of 12 images with the caption “Thinking about when she said ‘See you next era…’” Swift is seen wearing orange in every image.
Sensing a pattern, fans noticed that 12 minutes earlier, the popular New Heights podcast posted a teaser. The show, hosted by Swift’s partner Travis Kelce, posted an orange image on social media with a mysterious silhouette.
Then, a teaser video posted about her appearance showed her pulling the album from a briefcase. The actual album artwork, just as it is on her website, remains blurred for the time being.
The podcast will drop at 7pm ET (1am CET) tomorrow, and it will mark her first appearance on her partner’s show, despite the two being a couple since 2023.
No release date has been announced, but her site says that vinyl editions of the album would ship before 13 October. You can pre-order your copy here.
‘The Life of a Showgirl’ follows last year’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department‘, which was announced during the 2024 Grammys and released during her record-breaking Eras Tour.
The singer wrapped up the Eras Tour in December 2024, after playing 149 shows in 53 cities – a tour which raked in over $2.2 billion (approx. €1.9bn) across two years and five continents, making it the highest-grossing tour of all time.
The album is also her first release since Swift regained control over her entire body of work. In May, that pop star said she purchased her catalog of recordings – originally released through Big Machine Records – from their most recent owner, the private equity firm Shamrock Capital.
In recent years, Swift had been rerecording and releasing her first six albums in an attempt to regain control of her music. The albums became known as “Taylor’s Versions”.
In our review of ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, we said: “Putting aside the daunting and overtaxing lore (I couldn’t give a tinker’s fig about which song is actually a dig at Matt Healy or Joe Alwyn, much like I prefer to listen to ‘Style’ or ‘All Too Well’ without thinking about them as missiles aimed at Harry Styles and Jake Gyllenhaal), ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ is rather good. It sounds like a mix of her vivid but typical ripped-from-the-diary lyrics and the synthy pop production of her previous album, ‘Midnights’. (…) Sonically, it’s not a leap forward or even a stylistic shift; lyrically, however, there’s messy fun to be had.”
‘The Life of a Showgirl’ – Release date: TBA.
