'tis the damn spooky season
Midnights, Taylor Swift's first new album in almost 2 years, to debut in October
Taylor Swift has been burning the midnight oil, and her tenth studio album is almost here.
The pop star revealed Monday she's releasing an all new album titled Midnights, the "stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life," in October. It's her first album of entirely new material since December 2020's Evermore.
"This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams," Swift said. "The floors we pace and the demons we face."
Since the release of Evermore, Swift has been busy re-recording her earlier work in order to gain control of their master recordings. She has thus far re-released two old albums, Fearless and Red. With four to go, though, it wasn't clear whether her tenth album would arrive anytime soon or whether the re-recordings would take precedence.
But Swift surprised fans by first announcing a new album was on the way during a speech at Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards, where she won Video of the Year for her "All Too Well" short film.
Midnights comes after Swift in 2020 released two back-to-back pandemic albums, Folklore and its "sister album" Evermore, which earned some of the best reviews of her career. They saw Swift pursue a gloomier tone in the indie folk genre, a departure from her previous work. Swift's description of Midnights, which was accompanied by an image of her with her head in her hand in what looks like a hotel room, seems to suggest it may fit into the Folklore and Evermore wheelhouse, or at least not be a full return to the cheery pop aesthetic of 2019's Lover.
Midnights is set to drop on October 21 — presumably, at midnight.