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Journey Albums Ranked Worst to Best

Journey has been through their share of incarnations over the past five decades – some of them respected but low-selling, some of them bestsellers who were critically ignored. To help guide you through those periods, we're counting down all of their studio albums from worst to best.

Through it all, guitarist and co-founder Neal Schon , the only member to have appeared on every Journey album, has soldiered on. He started Journey in the mid-'70s as a fusion-focused group alongside fellow Santana product Gregg Rolie , but it was only after Steve Perry joined that they began building a platinum-selling legacy. Then, Jonathan Cain came over from the Babys to replace Rolie on keyboards, and his pop smarts and composition skills helped launch Journey into superstar status in the early '80s.

But by the end of the decade, Perry, who established a parallel solo career with 1984's Street Talk , began an on-again, off-again relationship with the band – much to the chagrin of all the new fans Journey had made in the meantime. After their final late '90s split, Schon and Cain went through two other frontmen before settling on current singer Arnel Pineda . He has since helped Journey rebuild its commercial fortunes, keeping the band as a reliable draw on the road while leading them to two Top 15 releases along the way. But which one tops them all? See our ranking of Journey's albums below.

Journey Albums Ranked

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Journey Albums Ranked

Journey  is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1973, composed of former members of Santana and Frumious Bandersnatch. The band has gone through several phases; its strongest commercial success occurred between 1978 and 1987 when Steve Perry was the lead vocalist. During that period, the band released a series of hit songs, including “Don’t Stop Believin'” (1981), which in 2009 became the top-selling track in iTunes history among songs not released in the 21st century.  Its parent studio album, Escape, the band’s seventh and most successful, reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and yielded another of their most popular singles, “Open Arms”. Its 1983 follow-up album, Frontiers, was almost as successful in the United States, reaching No. 2 and spawning several successful singles; it broadened the band’s appeal in the United Kingdom, where it reached No. 6 on the UK Albums Chart. Journey enjoyed a successful reunion in the mid-1990s and later regrouped with a series of lead singers including Arnel Pineda as a lead since December 2007. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, Journey has sold 48 million albums in the U.S., making them the 25th best-selling band. Their worldwide sales have reached nearly 100 million records globally, making them one of the world’s best-selling bands of all time. A 2005 USA Today opinion poll named Journey the fifth-best U.S. rock band in history.  Their songs have become arena rock staples and are still played on rock radio stations across the world. Journey ranks No. 96 on VH1’s 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Here are all Journey’s albums ranked.

Don’t miss out one of the world’s best-selling bands, Journey. Click below and listen to the timeless songs from one of the world’s best rock bands.

8. Journey (1975)

“Journey’s self-titled 1975 debut album stands as a watershed in the annals of jazz fusion and progressive rock. Released before the rise of the Steve Perry reign, this highly eclectic presentation mixes melodic rock (with all vocals done by keyboardist Gregg Rolie) with almost futuristic instrumental pieces; the song “To Play Some Music” starts off as a simple, almost gospel-like song but then accelerates into a rapid voyage through space and time. “Kohoutek” is a driving hard instrumental track that’s both earthbound and cosmic; think of the British superhero comic Miracleman set to music. “Mystery Mountain,” the final track on the album, is a quasi-mystical, almost Biblical telling of the Earth’s creation as depicted in the Book of Genesis. Two more instrumentals of note are “Topaz” by rhythm guitarist George Tickner (in his only recorded appearance with Journey; he quit after the album’s release) and the more subdued “Conversations” by bassist Ross Valory; both showcase more of Journey’s early knack for jazz fusion/prog-rock improvisation, which didn’t sit well with Columbia Records. The lyrics for the tracks “Of A Lifetime,” “In The Morning Day,” and “In My Lonely Feeling” (mostly written by Gregg Rolie) reflect life on the road as a perpetual touring machine; these thoughts ultimately led to Rolie’s abrupt resignation from Journey in 1980 even as Steve Perry gained gradual creative control of the band, which in 1981 was completed by Gregg’s replacement, former Babys keyboardist Jonathan Cain.”

7. Trial by Fire (1996)

“I consider Trial by Fire their best album. The songwriting displayed a depth and maturity that the band had not shown before, Easy to Fall and the title track are Ballads but they’re not about relationships rather they’re about deep spiritual matters and are testaments to the underrated songwriting skills of Steve Perry, Neal Schon, and Jonathan Cain. Also on this album Journey was able to try new things without ever forgetting who they were, something even the best bands fail to do sometimes. Songs like One More and Colors of the Spirit are not typical Journey songs but they work because they still sound like Journey songs. Even the offbeat reggae style is hidden track Baby I’m a Leavin you work out. So in conclusion Trial by Fire is Journeys most well written and well performed album ever and it’s a shame Steve Perry didn’t stay in the band long enough to record a follow up. Not only was he a fantastic singer but he was a great songwriter and it’s no wonder people have said that the song writing hasn’t been as good since he left. Now, if you want an album that is wall to wall rockers then this probably isn’t for you but I recommend it to any Journey fan that simply appreciates truly good and worth while music.

6. Raised on Radio (1986)

“Looking back after 30 years, I’ve realized some things about ROR. The reason to buy this album is for Randy Jackson’s bass lines, Neal Schon’s guitar, and Steve Perry’s R&B treatment of these tunes. There are some great tunes here, but I can hear that the great session drummers had their tracks isolated, sampled, and then sequenced back into the mix. It’s really too bad that Steve Smith was fired during the production of this recording, because his tracks are perfect. To make clear: This album was mostly done in pre-production using sequencers (ask Jonathan Cain) and then these tracks were laid-down in the studio with a click track. (That’s fine. I use click tracks myself.) If you’ve bring in the drummer -after- you’ve laid-down the “rhythm section” you can’t blame him for drift if all your giving him is quarter-note clicks; you need quieter 16ths in there, too. But JC and SP probably didn’t know that. A great example of a Journey album that was done without a click track is Escape. Check out “Still the Ride and “Mother, Father” and at the end of each tune, say “…and they didn’t even use a click track…” Buy “Raised On Radio” for these tracks: “Once You Love Somebody” , “Suzanne” , and “Happy To Give” -you can thank me later.”

5. Departure (1980)

“This third album of Journey’s with Steve Perry at the helm continues the mastery of classic melodic rock that the band is famed for. This would be the last album before Greg Rolie is replaced by Jonathan Cain on keyboards, so it is the last we get to hear of certain classic rock influences. For sure, this is a rocking album but with a definite moodiness to it in spots. I could rave at length about every one of these tracks and how listening to them makes me feel. As much as I love the more popular Journey albums that are to follow this one, there is something about that classic sound that is special. This effort was the third straight winning effort with Steve Perry at the vocal helm in three years for the band at the time. Once again, the band struck gold in the classic and melodic rock arena.”

See more:   The Killers Albums Ranked

4. Evolution (1979)

“Journey had found a successful formula on their previous album “Infinity” with the arrival of vocalist Steve Perry and an emphasis on shorter more commercial songs. “Evolution” could almost be considered “Infinity Part II” as it follows the same basic framework as it’s predecessor. “Evolution” blew the doors wide open for Journey selling a gazillion copies and making the band area sell out superstars. The one casualty of the band’s new direction was drummer Ansley Dunbar who quit prior to the albums recording. Jazz / Fusion great Steve Smith was brought in to occupy the drum seat and the band never missed a beat. As a whole I rank this album about the same as “Infinity”. I still really enjoy the few songs here where Perry and Rollie trade off lead vocals. This is especially effective on the track “Just The Same Way”. The big hit off the album “Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezing” is probably my least favorite track on the disc. A few underrated gems include “Daydream”, “Sweet And Simple” and the opening track “Majestic / Too Late”. Journey would go on to make better albums, but this one launched them into the Stratosphere.”

3. Frontiers (1983)

“THIS IS MY FAVORITE ALBUM OF ALL TIME. Steve Perry with Jonathan Cain writing most of the songs made the album more credible than their previous work. Faithfully is by far my favorite song of all time. I can listen to it and I just fall apart and cry because Steve Perry sings it with such feeling you can feel the passion pouring out of him. Separate Ways, Send Her My Love, After the Fall, Troubled Child, Edge of the Blade and Rubicon are all my new favorites on this album. I love the bonus tracks especially Only the Young and Ask the Lonely. Steve Perry gives new meaning to the phrase LEGEND. That’s what he is with this album and his other album either solo or with Journey. He will be remembered that way forever with future generations to come. Journey without him is just another band but with him it is legendary.”

2. Infinity (1978)

“Infinity is almost too good. By the time we get to the end of track two and we hear the ending harmony line of “Feeling that way…….. ooh, anytime that you want me………”, that’s the clear signal this is Journey’s breakthrough album, and those seven seconds represent one of the signature moments frozen in rock for all time. It’s a pronouncement that you’re listening to grade A material which takes a back seat to no one. Pretty bold stuff for a fledgling band who hadn’t yet made a dent in the rock scene into its first three albums. What’s not to like on Infinity? One of the fifty CDs to take on a deserted island with you, because you’d obviously be able to fit that many in a suitcase.”

1.Escape (1981)

“The undoubted KING of all AOR albums and with this, we knew Journey had finally arrived!! Every track is solid gold. The combination of the stylish musicianship, Schon’s clever guitar work, and the best voice in rock ensure the delivery of the superb set of songs proved a winning formula. Perry just delivers through and through and when you listen to WHO’S CRYING NOW, STILL THEY RIDE and the Fabulous OPEN ARMS it still makes my heart stop it’s that good!..The rockers such as KEEP ON RUNNING and the timeless DONT STOP BELIEVING are so well put together it shows the tightness and diversity of this team of musicians superbly well. Tracks off this are still radio played today throughout the world. It was a piece of history in the making and a monster seller for Journey…Time has proved it to be a classic that can be enjoyed by anybody, anywhere and anytime…PURE MAGIC!!”

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The Best Journey Albums of All Time

One of the biggest bands of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Journey is considered one of the best rock  bands of all time. List of the best Journey albums, including pictures of the album covers when available. This Journey discography is ranked from best to worst, so the top Journey albums can be found at the top of the list. To make it easy for you, we haven't included Journey singles, EPs, or compilations, so everything you see here should only be studio albums.

If you think the greatest Journey album isn't high enough on the list, then be sure to vote for it so it receives the credit it deserves. Make sure you don't just vote for critically acclaimed albums; if you have a favorite Journey album, then vote it up, even if it's not necessarily the most popular.

If you want to know, "What is the Best Journey album of all time?" or "What are the top Journey albums?" then this list will answer your questions. List ranges from Escape to Frontiers and more.This list of popular Journey CDs has been voted on by music fans around the world, so the order of this list isn't just one person's opinion. Use this list to build your own just like it that fits your opinions of where everything should be ranked.

1. Don't Stop Believin' 2. Stone in Love 3. Who's Crying Now 4. Keep On Runnin' 5. Still They Ride 6. Escape 7. Lay It Down 8. Dead or Alive 9. Mother, Father 10. Open Arms

1. Lights 2. Feeling That Way 3. Anytime 4. Lă Do Dā 5. Patiently 6. Wheel in the Sky 7. Somethin' to Hide 8. Winds of March 9. Can Do 10. Opened the Door

• # 1185 of 1,703 on The Greatest Albums of All-Time
• # 49 of 77 on Albums You're Guaranteed To Find In Every Parent's CD Collection
• # 137 of 333 on The Greatest Album Covers Of All Time

1. Majestic 2. Too Late 3. Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin' 4. City of the Angels 5. When You're Alone (It Ain't Easy) 6. Sweet and Simple 7. Lovin' You Is Easy 8. Just the Same Way 9. Do You Recall 10. Daydream 11. Lady Luck

1. Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) 2. Send Her My Love 3. Chain Reaction 4. After the Fall 5. Faithfully 6. Edge of the Blade 7. Troubled Child 8. Back Talk 9. Frontiers 10. Rubicon

1. Any Way You Want It 2. Walks Like a Lady 3. Someday Soon 4. People and Places 5. Precious Time 6. Where Were You 7. I'm Cryin' 8. Line of Fire 9. Departure 10. Good Morning Girl 11. Stay Awhile 12. Homemade Love

Raised on Radio

1. Girl Can't Help It 2. Positive Touch 3. Suzanne 4. Be Good to Yourself 5. Once You Love Somebody 6. Happy to Give 7. Raised on Radio 8. I'll Be Alright Without You 9. It Could Have Been You 10. The Eyes of a Woman 11. Why Can't This Night Go On Forever

Trial by Fire

1. Message of Love 2. One More 3. When You Love a Woman 4. If He Should Break Your Heart 5. Forever in Blue 6. Castles Burning 7. Don't Be Down on Me Baby 8. Still She Cries 9. Colors of the Spirit 10. When I Think of You 11. Easy to Fall 12. Can't Tame the Lion 13. It's Just the Rain 14. Trial by Fire 15. Baby I'm a Leavin' You 16. I Can See It in Your Eyes

1. Of a Lifetime 2. In the Morning Day 3. Kohoutek 4. To Play Some Music 5. Topaz 6. In My Lonely Feeling/Conversations 7. Mystery Mountain

1. Never Walk Away 2. Like a Sunshower 3. Change for the Better 4. Wildest Dream 5. Faith in the Heartland 6. After All These Years 7. Where Did I Lose Your Love 8. What I Needed 9. What It Takes to Win 10. Turn Down the World Tonight 11. The Journey (Revelation) 12. Let It Take You Back 13. The Place in Your Heart

Look Into the Future

1. On a Saturday Nite 2. It's All Too Much 3. Anyway 4. She Makes Me (Feel Alright) 5. You're on Your Own 6. Look into the Future 7. Midnight Dreamer 8. I'm Gonna Leave You

1. City of Hope 2. Edge of the Moment 3. Chain of Love 4. Tantra 5. Anything Is Possible 6. Resonate 7. She's a Mystery 8. Human Feel 9. Ritual 10. To Whom It May Concern 11. Someone 12. Venus

1. Higher Place 2. All the Way 3. Signs of Life 4. All the Things 5. Loved by You 6. Livin' to Do 7. World Gone Wild 8.  I Got a Reason 9. With Your Love 10. Lifetime of Dreams 11. Live and Breathe 12. Nothin' Comes Close 13. To Be Alive Again 14. Kiss Me Softly 15. We Will Meet Again

1. Spaceman 2. People 3. I Would Find You 4. Here We Are 5. Hustler 6. Next 7. Nickel and Dime 8. Karma

Generations

1. Faith in the Heartland 2. The Place in Your Heart 3. A Better Life (lead vocal: Castronovo) 4. Every Generation (lead vocal: Cain) 5. Butterfly (She Flies Alone) 6. Believe 7. Knowing That You Love Me 8. Out of Harms Way 9. In Self-Defense (lead vocal: Schon) 10. Better Together 11. Gone Crazy (lead vocal: Valory) 12. Beyond the Clouds 13. Never Too Late (lead vocal: Castronovo) 14. Pride of the Family (lead vocal: Cain)

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The best album credited to Journey is Escape which is ranked number 1,772 in the overall greatest album chart with a total rank score of 952.

Journey is ranked number 761 in the overall artist rankings with a total rank score of 2,205.

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Journey best albums.

The following albums by Journey are ranked highest in the greatest album charts:

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This may not be a complete discography for Journey.This listing only shows those albums by this artist that appear in at least one chart on this site. If an album is 'missing' that you think deserves to be here, you can include it in your own chart from the My Charts page!

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Shockingly underrated on this site. Few bands come to mind before these guys when I think of classic, good time rock 'n' roll. Obviously they're a hits band, and Don't Stop Believin' is incredibly overplayed, but, man do they have some good hits: Any Way You Want It, Separate Ways, Lovin' Touchin' Squeezin', Open Arms, Faithfully, Who's Crying Now, Wheel in the Sky, Stone in Love, Lights... the list goes on. This site is doing these guys pretty dirty.

I hate Glee for causing Don't Stop Believing to be the sing-along of choice for high school girls everywhere.

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Hard to believe that this band was unnoticed without Perry. Great voice, and plenty of great songs. On a strange side note, Journey's beetle is the only beetle I will ever like looking at. I once saw this hug inch long beetle with a loud buzz. I couldn't kill it. I wanted to, but I didn't want to hear the crunch. For years, I hated even looking at beetle pictures. Journey got me out of that with there awesomeness.

A good "hits" band

ESCAPE was definitely the best album. I actually preferred the second side (remember when albums had sides?). "Escape," "Lay it Down," "Dead or Alive," and "Mother, Father" were some of their strongest tunes and I definitely preferred them over the "Open Arms" sap. For a real treat, definitely check out Journey's first three albums. Incredible stuff that receives, virtually, no airplay these days.

My favorite band of all time

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14 best journey songs of all time (greatest hits).

Welcome to the mesmerizing world of Journey, a band that has left an indelible mark on the landscape of rock music.

With their anthemic sound and soaring melodies, Journey has become synonymous with timeless classics that have resonated with fans for generations.

Their music has become the backdrop to countless memories, evoking a sense of nostalgia and pure joy.

So, fasten your seatbelts and prepare for an exhilarating ride as we explore the 14 best Journey songs of all time.

Get ready to sing along, feel the music coursing through your veins, and experience the power of one of the greatest rock bands in history.

1. “After The Fall”

Prepare to embark on an unforgettable musical Journey with “After The Fall”.

This timeless classic rock song by Journey captivates listeners with its emotive music and meaningful lyrics, evoking a range of emotions that resonate deeply.

The powerful vocals and captivating chords of “After The Fall” create an anthemic experience that leaves a lasting impact.

With its depiction of life’s challenges and a message of hope in the face of adversity, the song strikes a chord with listeners, inspiring them to persevere.

Whether you interpret it as a metaphorical voyage through life’s ups and downs or a literal Journey to new destinations, “After The Fall” guarantees an unforgettable experience that will stay with you long after the song ends.

2. “Any Way You Want It”

Ready to hit the road with some serious tunes?

“Any Way You Want It” is sure to get you there!

This iconic Journey song, released in 1980, is one of their greatest hits and an absolute classic.

It has become a staple of classic rock radio stations, and featured in movies, TV shows, and commercials.

The song is instantly recognizable, with its signature guitar riff and lyrics about freedom and living life on your own terms.

The combination of the heavy guitar and the lyrics make it an instant sing-along anthem, and it’s sure to inspire and energize you on the road.

3. “Send Her My Love”

“Send Her My Love” is a powerful ballad that’ll tug at your heartstrings and make you feel the emotion of the lyrics.

Written and performed by Journey, the song was released in 1983 as the lead single off the band’s Frontiers album.

The lyrics tell the story of a man who’s coming to terms with the fact that his relationship with his significant other is over.

Despite his sadness, he sends his love to her in the hopes that it’ll help her find the happiness that he can no longer provide.

The song’s heartfelt vocals and memorable guitar licks are sure to bring a tear to anyone’s eye.

4. “Suzanne”

One of Journey’s most powerful ballads, “Suzanne”, is a tender love song that captures the emotion of saying goodbye to a loved one.

The song’s lyrics are full of emotion, as the narrator expresses his sadness at having to part ways with his beloved.

The song’s melody is equally powerful, with a slow, melancholic rhythm that conveys the narrator’s sorrow.

The song’s chorus is especially poignant, as the narrator sings of his longing for his beloved to return.

The song’s message is one of hope, as the narrator expresses his faith that his beloved will come back to him.

“Suzanne” is a timeless classic that will continue to resonate with listeners for years to come.

5. “Girl Can’t Help It”

Feeling the emotion of saying goodbye to a loved one?

Then you’ll love Journey’s classic hit, “Girl Can’t Help It”, which captures those feelings perfectly.

This song has been a part of Journey’s repertoire since 1986, and it’s become a fan favorite over the years.

The lyrics tell a story of a person who’s struggling to accept a goodbye and the emotions that come with it.

The instrumentation is also a standout, with its bright, rock-tinged sound that complements the lyrics perfectly.

The combination of the lyrics and the music makes “Girl Can’t Help It” an enduring classic that captures the sentiment of saying goodbye like no other.

6. “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin'”

If you’re looking for a rock anthem that’ll have you singing along, Journey’s “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin'” is the perfect choice!

Released in 1979, the track was their fifth single from the album Evolution and went on to become one of their most successful charting songs.

The lyrics, written by lead singer Steve Perry and guitarist Neal Schon, are a celebration of a passionate relationship and the joys that come with it.

Musically, the song is an upbeat rock number, featuring Schon’s signature guitar riffs, a propulsive rhythm section, and Perry’s powerful vocal performance.

The song was also a live favorite, as the band often performed it with an extended instrumental break that allowed the audience to sing along.

All these elements combined make “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin'” a timeless classic and an essential addition to any playlist of the greatest Journey songs of all time.

7. “I’ll Be Alright Without You”

You’ll be mesmerized by Journey’s “I’ll Be Alright Without You”.

It’s an upbeat rock anthem that showcases Steve Perry’s heartfelt lyrics and Neal Schon’s driving guitar riffs.

Beginning with an uplifting guitar riff, the song quickly builds to a powerful chorus, propelled by passionate vocals of Perry.

The lyrics speak of finding strength and inner peace in spite of heartache, as the narrator reassures them that they’ll be alright without the one they love.

The strong instrumental accompaniment, including Schon’s memorable guitar solos, punctuates the song and adds an extra layer of emotion.

“I’ll Be Alright Without You” is a song that speaks to the power of resilience in the face of adversity and is sure to leave an impression on listeners.

8. “Faithfully”

As you reminisce about the remarkable journey you’ve shared, there’s one song that perfectly embodies the essence of your voyage.

“Faithfully” by Journey, a beloved classic rock anthem, encapsulates the spirit of staying true to the journey, even during the most challenging moments.

This timeless song expresses the importance of unwavering dedication and commitment to the chosen path, instilling hope and determination to persevere, regardless of the obstacles faced.

With its captivating melody and heartfelt lyrics, “Faithfully” resonates with a sense of resilience, becoming an essential addition to any cherished collection of Journey’s greatest hits.

9. “When You Love A Woman”

You can feel the emotion of love and devotion in the powerful lyrics of Journey’s “When You Love A Woman”, a song that speaks to the joys and struggles of a relationship and the importance of cherishing every moment.

The song opens with an acoustic guitar and leads into a soaring chorus of electric guitars and drums, highlighting the passionate sentiment of the lyrics.

Steve Perry’s emotive vocal delivery is a perfect complement to the story he tells of a man so deeply in love that he would do anything to make the woman in his life happy.

As the lyrics suggest, when you truly love someone, it’s not just an emotion but a commitment that requires hard work and effort, and the song captures this sentiment beautifully.

Throughout the song, the band builds the energy to a crescendo, culminating in a powerful guitar solo that encapsulates the passionate nature of the song.

“When You Love A Woman” is an iconic Journey song that celebrates the highs and lows of a meaningful relationship.

10. “Only The Young”

As you continue your journey, you may find yourself wanting to take a break and reflect on the experiences you’ve had so far.

One song that can help you do that is “Only The Young” by Journey.

This song is a powerful reminder that life is short and that we should make the most of it while we can.

The lyrics are full of hope and optimism, encouraging us to take risks and live life to the fullest.

The song also has a strong message of resilience, reminding us that no matter what life throws at us, we can always find a way to keep going.

With its uplifting message and catchy melody, “Only The Young” is sure to be one of the greatest Journey songs of all time.

11. “Don’t Stop Believin'”

Experience the power of resilience and hope with Journey’s classic hit “Don’t Stop Believin'”!

Let its uplifting message and catchy melody motivate you to keep going and make the most of life.

With its iconic opening guitar riff and Steve Perry’s powerful vocals, “Don’t Stop Believin'” is a timeless classic that has been inspiring people for decades.

The song’s lyrics are a reminder to never give up and to keep striving for your dreams, no matter how difficult the journey may be.

The song’s message of hope and perseverance is one that resonates with people of all ages and backgrounds, making it one of the most beloved songs of all time.

12. “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)”

Continuing with the theme of Journey songs, let’s take a look at one of their bigger hits, “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)”.

This song was released in 1983 and has become one of the band’s most recognizable anthems.

It features a driving beat and memorable lyrics about the pain of separation and the hope that a broken relationship can still be saved.

Through its chorus, it conveys a sense of determination and resilience in the face of adversity.

It’s a song that speaks to anyone who has experienced a personal tragedy and is sure to be a classic for generations to come.

13. “Who’s Crying Now”

With its powerful, emotive lyrics, “Who’s Crying Now” is a song that captures the heartache of love lost and the bittersweet realization that it may never be regained.

The song was released by the band Journey in 1981.

It details the emotional roller-coaster of a break-up and the pain of having to accept that love can be fleeting.

The lyrics explore the idea that even after a relationship has ended, both parties still feel the pain of the breakup, with neither one having the courage to make the first move toward reconciliation.

The song’s upbeat yet melancholy tone perfectly captures the feeling of a broken heart, making it one of the most poignant and memorable songs in all of music.

14. “Open Arms”

“Open Arms” is a beautiful ballad that captures the longing for a lost love, and the hope that one day they’ll be reunited.

Performed by the band Journey and written by Jonathan Cain and Steve Perry, the song is a classic example of how a simple melody can be used to express such powerful emotion.

Its lyrics are deep and meaningful, as they evoke the feelings of sadness and loneliness that come with a broken relationship, but also the joy and optimism of reuniting with a lost loved one.

The song is also musically powerful, with its slow and gentle rhythm and the soaring guitar solos that give the piece its signature sound.

“Open Arms” is an enduring classic that will remain a staple of Journey’s greatest hits for many years to come.

Best Journey Songs – Final Thoughts

You can’t go wrong with any of these 14 best Journey songs of all time.

Whether you’re singing along to “Don’t Stop Believin'” or getting lost in the emotional ballad of “Open Arms”, these songs are sure to take you on a musical journey.

They’ve each stood the test of time and remain some of the greatest hits in rock history.

So grab some headphones and take a journey with these timeless classics.

You won’t regret it.

Put on your favorite song and let the music take you away.

It’s time to experience the beauty of Journey’s music and all it has to offer.

You may also like: Best Rock Songs of All Time

Will Fenton

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Taylor Swift's new album, The Tortured Poets Department, has garnered criticism from faith leaders who have taken to social media this week to express their distaste with the lyrical content that they believe mocks God and Christians. 

Released last Friday, critics have voiced concern over lyrics that seem to suggest that Christians are both hateful and judgemental.

In the song "But Daddy I Love Him," Swift sings:

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"But daddy I love him / I just learned these people only raise you / To cage you / Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best / Clutchin' their pearls, sighing, 'What a mess' / I just learned these people try and save you 'Cause they hate you."

In the same song, Swift sings:

"God save the most judgmental creeps / Who say they want what's best for me / Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I'll never see / Thinkin' it can change the beat / Of my heart when he touches me / And counteract the chemistry / And undo the destiny / You ain't gotta pray for me / Me and my wild boy and all of this wild joy / If all you want is gray for me / Then it's just white noise, and it's just my choice."

In the song "Guilty As Sin," Swift sings: "What if I roll the stone away? / They're gonna crucify me anyway / What if the way you hold me is actually what's holy."

Eleven of the 31 songs contain an "E" under the album's description listing, which stands for "explicit." And several songs have the F-word included within the lyrics. 

Shane Pruitt , the National Next Gen director for the Southern Baptist Convention's North American Mission Board and co-author of Calling Out the Called , wrote in a Facebook post that there is a difference between being secular and being "Anti-Christian." He urged Christian parents to seriously consider if they should allow their children to listen to Swift's music. 

"I'm definitely not the minister or parent that has the 'no secular music' stance," Pruitt wrote. "Also, I fully realize unbelievers are going to act like unbelievers. HOWEVER, there is a difference between being secular and being ANTI-CHRISTIAN."

Pruitt added that he used to listen to Swift but said he thinks "now it's time to reconsider." 

"As Christians, who are filled with the Spirit, should we be entertained by, sing with, and expose our kids to lyrics that aren't just different than what you believe, but are actually mocking what you believe?" Pruitt asked. 

The Christian entertainment review company MovieGuide believes the album "mocks Christianity."

"While it's no secret that Taylor Swift is not a Christian, she made her hatred for religion known through her newly released album 'The Tortured Poets Department,'" MovieGuide stressed in its review . 

"The album is full of minor quips that elevate Swift above God while also featuring two songs devoted to tearing down the Christian sexual ethic."

MovieGuide contends the lyrics to the song "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)" contain rhetoric alluding to the idea that God doesn't want to "lift a finger." 

The lyrics read: "They shake their heads sayin', 'God help her,' / When I tell 'em he's my man/ but your good Lord doesn't lift a finger / I can fix him, no, really, I can. And only I can."

"The fact that one of the most popular and famous celebrities of her generation cannot find happiness reveals that living in the world leads to death while living for Christ and under his teachings leads to life," the review stated. 

"Unfortunately, Swift has chosen the path toward death and is reaping the fruits of her labor."

MovieGuide also objects to the lyrics of the song "Florida!!!," which the organization says is about "going off the deep end and all in on worldly fun and entertainment."

"While Swift has since clarified that this song was about a fantasy rather than an actual experience she has had, it still glorifies going off the deep and engaging in complete debauchery," the organization states. 

Sean Feucht, a conservative Christian singer and former worship leader at Bethel Church who founded the Let Us Worship movement, took to X , formerly known as Twitter, to share how he believes the new album is making fun of Christians. 

"Almost half the songs on Taylor Swift's new album contain explicit lyrics (E), make fun of Christians and straight up blaspheme God. Is this the music you want your kids listening to?" Feucht wrote. 

"You think I'm just being religious  & overreacting? Read the lyrics & decide for yourself." 

Alex Clark, host of the Turning Point USA podcast "The Spillover," who also launched the pop culture show "POPlitics!" didn't take kindly to Feucht's comments on Swift. 

"Sean Feucht, whatever his name is … let's not even get into his own controversies and who he aligns with and all the sketchy stuff that this guy, who he surrounds himself with in the Christian community. Cause that could be a whole other episode. So, it's like OK, we're going to take advice from these people who have their own situations and it's like, so are you never going to watch any Netflix movies? You're never going to listen to any artist. If this is the criteria that we're going with, … basically, you have to say: 'I'm never going to listen to music,'" Clark said on her show. 

While many faith and worship leaders have criticized Swift's album, Forbes reports that The Tortured Poets Department needed only a few hours before it became the bestselling album of 2024 in the U.S. The album sold roughly 1.4 million copies in just its first full day of availability. 

Nicole VanDyke is a reporter for The Christian Post. 

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HYPERBEAM, “Okay Fine”

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After months of hype, along with debut of a new live show at Coachella earlier this month and a Billboard cover story preceding it, the fourth studio album from Justice has arrived via the duo’s longtime label, Ed Banger Records. The French duo’s first studio album since 2016 — “Because the album cycle is so long every time, we’re both like, ‘OK, is there going to be anybody that’s still interested?’” the pair’s Augé jokingly told us — Hyperdrama is an often intense, sometimes lightly psychedelic and altogether satisfying 13 track collection that contains elements of classic Justice while also pushing their catalog forward into a kaleidoscopic future.

The album includes high-caliber collaborators like Miguel, Thundercat, Conan Moccasin and Kevin Parker, with the latter artist appearing on the album’s lead single “One Night/All Night” and the just-out “Neverender” — a gliding, punchy, lightly psychedelic melody-forward production on which the Australian singer-producer’s voice takes on the same string quality as the disco stabs the track is structured from.

Vienna-born, Manchester-based house producer salute — a 2023 Billboard artist to watch — sets the stage for their debut album, True Magic , with the project’s lead single, “Saving Flowers,” a lush jacking house production outfitted with silky vocals from Rina Sawayama. Coming in July via Ninja Tune, salute’s forthcoming album also features Disclosure, Empress Of, Karma Kid, Sam Gellaitry, piri, Léa Sen, LEILAH and Nakamura Minami, with the producer posting up at a house in the English countryside to work with this crew. “In dance music there always seems to be this focus on doing everything yourself,” they say, “but I wanted to get a team around me to develop the ideas I had. One thing I’m really proud of is how organic the work with the collaborators is.”

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Taylor Swift's 'The Tortured Poets Department' is the messiest, horniest, and funniest album she's ever made

• Taylor Swift released her 11th studio album, "The Tortured Poets Department," on Friday.
• The standard edition's 16 tracks are reminiscent of "Midnights," but more textured and chaotic.
• The best tracks are "Loml," "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart," and "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?"

Taylor Swift's 11th studio album "The Tortured Poets Department" arrived Friday in all its messy glory after a pointedly low-key rollout .

In a prologue included with the CD booklet, Swift describes the album as "a detailed rewinding / For the purpose of warning / For the sake of reminding."

Swift frames "Poets" as a debrief of an ill-fated love affair, "a mutual manic phase" in the wake of a breakup — torrid, brief, yet creatively fruitful. "A smirk creeps onto this poet's face," she writes. "Because it's the worst men that I write best."

"Poets" is the first set of all-new songs that Swift has released since her breakup with Joe Alwyn, whom she dated for about six years before their split made headlines last April . Shortly after, she was linked to The 1975 frontman Matty Healy .

The follow-up to Swift's record-breaking 2022 album "Midnights" echoes the commercially favored pop-forward sound of its predecessor, with much of the album produced by Swift's longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff . Aaron Dessner, who worked extensively with Swift on sister albums "Folklore" and "Evermore," produced the remaining chunk of songs.

Two hours after the album's release, Swift surprised fans with "The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology," which contains 15 additional songs . However, for the purposes of our review, the standard-edition tracklist will be treated as the primary, cohesive body of work.

As Business Insider's senior music reporter , I listened to the new album on my own, jotting down my initial thoughts track by track.

Here's what I thought of each song on "The Tortured Poets Department" upon first listen . (Skip to the end to see the only songs worth listening to and the album's final score.)

"Fortnight" sounds like a vault track from "Midnights" (derogatory).

Throughout my life, pressing play on a new Taylor Swift album has been a treat. But as soon as the opening synths on "The Tortured Poets Department" hit my eardrums, I felt my body tense up.

Antonoff has caught a lot of flack from music critics and other skeptics for doubling down on his signature sound and failing to innovate, particularly when it comes to his creative partnership with Swift. I don't tend to agree — to assign all blame to Antonoff is to belittle his female collaborators — but alas, "Fortnight" is a prime example of this complaint. The song immediately sounds like a "Midnights" B-side: boring, banal, and exactly what I do not want from this album .

Worse still, "Fortnight" squanders Post Malone . The rapper-turned-earnest-dude singer is coming off an acclaimed set of duets with Noah Kahan ("Dial Drunk") and Beyoncé ("Levii's Jeans"), both of which offered the proper platform for Malone's surprisingly folksy voice. In Swift's world, however, he is rendered superfluous.

"The Tortured Poets Department" is a cringe-worthy song and an unworthy title track.

It is objectively hilarious that Swift released "1989 (Taylor's Version)" in October with a direct request to stop speculating about her personal life , only to name her new album after a song that invites us to speculate about her personal life — specifically her (alleged) fling with Matty Healy last spring.

"You left your typewriter at my apartment / Straight from the tortured poets department," Swift sings in the song's opening line, perhaps confirming her album title was inspired by a caption from Healy's now-deleted Instagram, " Gay Poets Society ." (I can't think of anyone else in Swift's social circle who's gleefully pretentious enough to carry around a typewriter.) "You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate," she sings later, likely a nod to The 1975's breakout hit " Chocolate ."

Not only does "The Tortured Poets Department" invite speculation, but in the bridge, it even names names.

"You told Lucy you'd kill yourself if I ever leave / And I had said that to Jack about you, so I felt seen," Swift sings. Note: Her friend Lucy Dacus (of boygenius fame) was filmed dancing with Healy at The Eras Tour . The second name almost certainly refers to Antonoff, who also coproduced The 1975's latest album, " Being Funny In a Foreign Language ."

"Everyone we know understands why it's meant to be," Swift adds in a teasing lilt. "'Cause we're crazy." No kidding!

This song is surely meant to be over-the-top corny and tongue-in-cheek amusing, and it succeeds on both counts. Even the title is an inside joke.

Unfortunately, lyrics like "We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist" and "I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever" will haunt me until the day that I die. I can already see disparaging tweets about "Kidz Bop (Taylor's Version)" in my mind's eye. This is worse than the "sexy baby" fiasco .

Especially with its typical Antonoff production, this song sounds like an AI-created "Midnights" parody. Swift is right about one thing: This is definitely not the Chelsea Hotel.

"My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" would be right at home on "1989 (Taylor's Version)."

"My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" sounds exactly like the vault tracks from "1989 (Taylor's Version)" — which, you guessed it, were accused of sounding eerily similar to "Midnights" songs.

To be fair, I love all the "1989" vault tracks (especially " Is It Over Now? "), so this isn't necessarily a knock in my book. But it does mean that "My Boy" fails to stand out. It relies on a fast-dulling formula.

"Down Bad" is the "Slut!" sequel no one expected.

There were rumors The 1975 was meant to be featured on " Slut! " and Healy is even listed as a cowriter in some physical copies of "1989 (Taylor's Version)." (He met Swift a decade ago, around the time the album was originally written.)

Healy's contributions to the song were apparently erased after fans condemned their relationship last year . We assumed it would go down as a glitch in her legacy. But as always, Swift gets the last word .

Where Swift once sighed, "If they call me a slut, you know it might be worth it for once," now she fumes, "Fuck it, I was in love. So fuck you if I can't have us."

Both songs confront the disconnect between Swift's polished public image and her salacious desires, as well as the intersection of romance and delusion.

On "Down Bad," this album starts to pick up steam. Antonoff's sparkly synths and Swift's breezy vocals persist, but we're teased with a slice of her brain that's enthrallingly unhinged.

"So Long, London" illustrates the agony of a drawn-out goodbye.

In terms of sequencing, "Poets" is like the anti-"Midnights." Where the latter was front-loaded with album highlights, "Poets" kicked off by testing my loyalty. The first 16 minutes or so had me seriously concerned.

"So Long, London" marked a key turning point in my listening experience — a blessed wellspring of trust in Swift's vision.

Dessner's influence is immediately felt in the song's slow-burn pacing. As a production team, Swift and Dessner excel at creating tension and building toward catharsis. (Think "Exile," "Champagne Problems," " Would've, Could've, Should've ," etc.) "So Long, London" is another such success story.

Swift's lyrics mirror the production, mounting with urgency as the seconds tick away — as if her love is crumbling in real time.

"I'm pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free," she sings, her voice heavy with grief. "You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues? / I died on the altar waiting for the proof."

"But Daddy I Love Him" is a scorched-earth song where Swift really comes alive.

Last year, I wrote an article encouraging Swift to criticize her own fans , particularly those with an intense fixation on her personal life. At the time, this felt like a pipe dream. Swift has long embraced a laissez-faire approach to fan behavior, even when it's been obviously invasive, homophobic , or even threatening .

Now, my request doesn't seem so far-fetched. "But Daddy I Love Him" is the closest Swift has ever gotten to scolding parasocial Swifties, many of whom were vocal about their distaste for Healy .

After cracking some jokes at their expense ("I'm having his baby / No I'm not! / But you should see your faces"), Swift goes absolutely scorched-earth in the bridge.

"God save the most judgmental creeps who say they want what's best for me," she spits. "Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I'll never see / Thinking it can change the beat of my heart when he touches me."

The song plays like a grown-up, jaded version of "Love Story," where societal pressures and family feuds are no match for Swift's wildest whims. And she goes all-in: "But Daddy I Love Him" is the longest song on the album, stuffed with Shakespeare-level dramatics.

"Fresh Out the Slammer" is a fascinating tale of freedom and lust.

"Fresh Out the Slammer" kicks off with an Orville Peck-esque electric guitar, adopting a vintage Western-rock vibe. After flipping off her audience in the previous track, this feels like the ideal moment for Swift to assume the role of an outlaw.

The song title, a euphemism for getting out of jail, works in this context, with Swift using the phrase to evoke her newfound single status. She's recently left a relationship and she's eager to "run back home" to an old flame.

This is juicy on many levels when compared to the timeline of Swift's love life (at least, the timeline the public is privy to). But speaking broadly, this song is juicy no matter who it's about. Swift revels in her long-sought freedom, justifying her rebound with a loaded shrug: "I did my time."

I don't know the intimate details of Swift's love life, but I do know one thing. If you ever compare your relationship to jail time, my hope is that you'll run — as fast and as far away as possible.

"Florida!!!" includes a potent feature from Florence + the Machine.

"Florida!!!" is a fascinating outlier on this tracklist. The lyrics are rich yet cryptic, boasting clear traces of Florence Welch's creative touch.

Welch is a painfully underrated lyricist, so I'm thrilled she was given a proper feature on this album. (We all remember what happened with Lana Del Rey's wasted vocals on "Midnights.") I can only imagine that Swift heard recent Welch cuts like "King" and " Girls Against God " and thought to herself, "I wish I wrote that."

"Florida!!!" is ambiguous with its bottom line, but with a song that sounds this cool and spooky, it's hard to care if the story has a moral. Swift sings of a town that "reeks of driving myself crazy," while Welch fantasizes about getting drunk and drowning her exes in a swamp. "Is that a bad thing to say in a song?" they harmonize with a knowing smile, all but winking at the listener.

Welch infuses a jolt of mystic, curious energy into Swift's modern-pop diarism. Their duet is a fever dream, full of hedonistic pursuits and hallucinations. It's perfectly placed at the album's midway point, foreshadowing a descent into madness in its latter half. Both women succumb to Florida's charms like they're following a siren song — and they're beckoning us to follow.

"Guilty as Sin?" is somehow sad and horny at the same time.

For those who'll accuse this album of barely addressing Swift's longest public relationship, allow me to enter the first verse of this song into evidence: "My boredom's bone-deep / This cage was once just fine / Am I allowed to cry? / I dream of cracking locks / Throwing my life to the wolves, or the ocean rocks / Crashing into him tonight."

In just a few lines, Swift offers a more poignant portrayal of the " seven-year itch " than I have ever heard or read. In reality, falling out of love is a sluggish and bitter process.

Swift copes with this phenomenon by projecting her carnal cravings onto a clean, blank slate — a man who hasn't disappointed her yet.

"Someone told me, 'There's no such thing as bad thoughts, only your actions talk,'" she continues. "We've already done it in my head / If it's make-believe / Why does it feel like a vow / We'll both uphold somehow?"

To put it bluntly, these lyrics are bonkers. I cannot believe Swift committed these thoughts to paper, recorded them in a studio, submitted them to her label, and then released them into the world. She has been horny in her music before ("Dress," "Maroon") and she's been audacious in her music before (the entirety of "Speak Now"), but given her current level of fame, this is unprecedented.

To be clear, I mean that in a positive way. I'm eating this up. After all, Swift's been warning us for years that she's the maddest woman this town has ever seen . She had a marvelous time ruining everything, haven't you heard?

"Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" is an obvious standout.

Swift loves a self-righteous battle cry ("I Did Something Bad," "The Man," "Vigilante Shit"), but this might be the first time she's gotten it exactly right. Backed by warlike drums, Swift lays siege to the celebrity machine.

"Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" contains some all-timers in Swift's storied catalog of one-liners: "You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me" is a personal favorite, but every lyric lands like a bomb or a punchline: "Put narcotics into all of my songs / And that's why you're still singing along."

This song is everything that "Reputation" wanted to be: darkly funny, sharply observed, vulnerable, sinister, and formidable at every turn.

"I was tame, I was gentle, 'til the circus life made me mean / Don't you worry folks, we took out all her teeth! / Who's afraid of little old me?" Swift wails in the chorus, before adding coyly: "Well, you should be."

Indeed, if that question is coming from Swift, the answer is me. I am terrified of this woman for making me feel so demented and powerful with a five-minute package of pop melodies.

"I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)" depicts Swift at a crossroads in her relationship.

As its title suggests, "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)" begins to reveal the cracks in Swift's feverish love story. "The smoke cloud billows out his mouth like a freight train through a small town," she sings to open the song. "The jokes that he told across the bar were revolting and far too loud."

Although she spends the rest of the song pledging to "fix him," balking at any suggestion that she might be out of her depth, Swift's doubts taint the whole affair.

In a stroke of surreal brilliance, Swift paints her unlikable lover as an old-school cowboy — cruising down a Texas highway, hands calloused from his trusty pistol — calling back to her lawless behavior in "Fresh Out the Slammer."

"Loml" is the most heart-wrenching song on the tracklist.

"Loml" sees Swift reflecting on a doomed relationship, retracing her steps, watching helplessly as the "love of my life" becomes the "loss of my life."

"You shit-talked me under the table / Talking rings and talking cradles / I wish I could unrecall / How we almost had it all," Swift sings in the show-stopping bridge. "Dancing phantoms on the terrace / Are they secondhand embarrassed / That I can't get out of bed? Because something counterfeit's dead."

These questions recall " The 1 ," the opening track on "Folklore," which Swift began to perform on The Eras Tour after her breakup with Alwyn was made public.

"The 1" is all about existential probes and what-if doom spirals, all about "digging up the grave another time." In "Loml," Swift falls back into her old patterns: "Still alive, killing time at the cemetery / Never quite buried."

"Loml" is the only song on "Poets" that made me cry on the first play.

I'll admit I'm surprised there aren't more songs like this on this tracklist. But a love that burns, crackles, and explodes is much easier to obsess over (and write pop songs about) than a love that decays, resurrects, and dies again. That's what makes the painful precision of "Loml" even more impressive. Swift's grave-plotting memory is her greatest asset as a lyricist.

"I Can Do It With a Broken Heart" is extravagant, self-referential, and exhilarating.

"I Can Do It With a Broken Heart" might be the most pop-forward fit of maximalism on this entire tracklist. Against all odds, it's an album highlight.

This is a masterful exposé of a carefully constructed spectacle. Swift depicts her onstage performance as a kind of perverse wish fulfillment: "All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting, 'MORE!'" (Fans will recognize this imagery from the "Folklore" standout "Mirrorball," which Swift performed acoustically on the opening night of The Eras Tour.)

We don't have time to unpack all the revelations in this song, but suffice it to say that "Broken Heart" succeeds as a satire, a confession, and an indictment of sexist double standards ("Lights, camera, bitch, smile!"), all at the same time.

Women in pop music are expected to refract sequin stars, hit their marks, fake it 'til they make it — even when they wanna die — while men are permitted to show up in T-shirts, stand still, and lip-sync . If this song makes you uncomfortable, it's probably meant to.

In the outro, Swift leaves little room for ambiguity, exclaiming deliriously: "I'm miserable! And no one even knows!" It's campy and it's vicious. She lands the punchline, but it feels more like she's twisting the knife.

"The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived" is a classic Swiftian takedown.

"The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived" is alive with malice, full of deliciously specific anecdotes: "You tried to buy some pills / From a friend of friends of mine / They just ghosted you / Now you know what it feels like." If someone had written that lyric about me, I'd be forced to fake my own death and start fresh with a new identity. And that's just the first verse. The bridge is positively lethal.

If you're surprised by the proficiency of this takedown — all for a man who was "gone by the morning" — may I remind you of Swift's magnum opus, " All Too Well ," which she reportedly wrote about a three-month relationship that blew up in her face.

This is where Swift thrives as a songwriter: the interpretive limbo between possibility and security; the yearning for what could've been; the aftermath of short-lived bliss, when all that's left is the future you once imagined.

"The Alchemy" is open to interpretation.

Much like "Mastermind," the closing track on "Midnights," "The Alchemy" could be interpreted as a love song or a metaphor for Swift's career .

"What if I told you I'm back? / The hospital was a drag / Worst sleep that I ever had," she sings in the first verse, poking fun at her own propensity to spin painful experiences into albums.

Indeed, the chorus plays like a tongue-in-cheek nod to Swift's dominance in the industry: "Ditch the clowns, get the crown / Baby, I'm the one to be," she winks. "Honestly, who are we to fight the alchemy?" She manages to toe the line between cheeky and sincere, tipping her hat to the fans who transformed her life and put her on the throne.

"Clara Bow" draws a parallel between Swift and the first "It Girl."

"Clara Bow" joins Swift's collection of songs about the peculiar experience of fame. (Think: "The Lucky One," "The Last Great American Dynasty," "You're On Your Own, Kid," etc.) To hear her tell it, Swift felt stardom beckon from a very young age, almost like an invisible string was tying her to the stage.

In the song, Swift dreams of glory and promises to be "dazzling." She even name-drops Stevie Nicks and her mysterious moonlit magic . But she also allows for a sliver of regret in retrospect: "Only when your girlish glow flickers just so / Do they let you know / It's hell on earth to be heavenly."

As the song winds down, Swift adds her own name to the succession of Bow and Nicks, doubling as the observed and her own observer. It's a fitting end to an album full of pomp and performance.

Final Grade: 8.4/10

Here's the thing: Swift knows that people will pore over the details of this album to dissect her romantic travails. I'm as guilty as anyone else, and I know it's not a noble practice. It's an obsessive storm Swift is willing to weather to do what she loves for a living.

But Swift did not become as big and beloved as she is because of that storm. In fact, I would argue she's successful in spite of it. 

Most people are not chronically online Easter egg hunters. Most people do not play Swift's music in the car, in the shower, or in a dark room after a bad day, over and over for years, because they crave the details of her latest breakup.

We don't listen to Swift's music because it necessarily is true. We listen because it feels true. She writes about characters we recognize and experiences we've lived, blowing everything out of proportion in the way we wish we could. The size of Swift's platform is directly proportional to the bigness of her feelings, whatever or whoever may have provoked them.

That said, don't let the "tattooed golden retriever" (the man or the lyric) distract you from the truth. Corny as some moments may be, this is a marvelously deranged pop album.

Despite the rough start, Swift builds incredible momentum from track four onwards, tossing out confessions and confronting hecklers with a tearaway, absurd kind of zeal.

Of course, there are still mid-tempo synths and simple earworms by the fistful. This is hardly new sonic territory — nor would I praise the album as an artistic risk — but "The Tortured Poets Department" is bolder and more berserk than Swift's previous pop achievements. "1989" was a tricky pivot at the time, but Swift still made sure to play by the radio's rules, sticking to traditional song structures and repetitive hooks. More recently, "Midnights" gestured toward interesting themes but ultimately felt thin.

On "Poets," Swift doesn't exactly break with her well-established, commercial-friendly conventions — but she does toy with her audience in interesting ways.

There's depth and texture in these songs, even shades of the guitar-forward rock sound that many fans crave. It's a pop album without an obvious radio hit. Swift's lyrics are surprisingly meta, packed with fourth-wall breaks and self-aware pouts. Her vocal delivery is varied, passionate, often performative. She shrieks and snarls and deploys a whisper that's dripping with lust, such that we've rarely heard. For a pop star with Swift's relish for mass appeal, this album almost sounds bloodthirsty by comparison.

"The Tortured Poets Department" won't be everyone's cup of tea. It's chaotic, verbose, and full of words that scream "I own a thesaurus."

It still works, because Swift is in on the joke.

At the end of the day, I'd rather have a sensitive and self-indulgent album than one that's trying too hard to be pretty and perfect. I can't relate to the woman looking statuesque onstage, with her polite grin and sequined silhouette. But I can relate to the woman who bares her teeth when the crowd demands, "MORE!"

Worth listening to:

"So Long, London"

"But Daddy, I Love Him"

"Fresh Out the Slammer"

"Florida!!! (featuring Florence + The Machine)"

"Guilty as Sin?"

"Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?"

"I Can Fix Him (No Really, I Can)"

"I Can Do It With a Broken Heart"

"The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived"

"The Alchemy"

"Clara Bow"

Background music:

"My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys"

Press skip:

"Fornight (featuring Post Malone)"

"The Tortured Poets Department"

*Final album score based on songs per category (1 point for "Worth listening to," .5 for "Background music," 0 for "Press skip").

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Album review

On ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Taylor Swift Could Use an Editor

Over 16 songs (and a second LP), the pop superstar litigates her recent romances. But the themes, and familiar sonic backdrops, generate diminishing returns.

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By Lindsay Zoladz

If there has been a common thread — an invisible string, if you will — connecting the last few years of Taylor Swift’s output, it has been abundance.

Nearly 20 years into her career, Swift, 34, is more popular and prolific than ever, sating her ravenous fan base and expanding her cultural domination with a near-constant stream of music — five new albums plus four rerecorded ones since 2019 alone. Her last LP, “Midnights” from 2022, rolled out in multiple editions, each with its own extra songs and collectible covers. Her record-breaking Eras Tour is a three-and-a-half-hour marathon featuring 40-plus songs, including the revised 10-minute version of her lost-innocence ballad “All Too Well.” In this imperial era of her long reign, Swift has operated under the guiding principle that more is more.

What Swift reveals on her sprawling and often self-indulgent 11th LP, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is that this stretch of productivity and commercial success was also a tumultuous time for her, emotionally. “I can read your mind: ‘She’s having the time of her life,’” Swift sings on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘more.’” And yet, that’s exactly what she continues to provide, announcing two hours after the release of “Poets” that — surprise! — there was a second “volume” of the album, “The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.

Gone are the character studies and fictionalized narratives of Swift’s 2020 folk-pop albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The feverish “Tortured Poets Department” is a full-throated return to her specialty: autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.

Swift doesn’t name names, but she drops plenty of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching “So Long, London”), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed “But Daddy I Love Him”) and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in — ahem — football metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title’s odd capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”

At times, the album is a return to form. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and controlled until lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” inspire the song to thaw and glow. Even better is the chatty, radiant title track , on which Swift’s voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Many Swift songs get lost in dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth ?! — is strangely humanizing.

Taylor Swift’s New Album Reviewed

For all its sprawl, though, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a curiously insular album, often cradled in the familiar, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s production. ( Aaron Dessner of the National, who lends a more muted and organic sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write five tracks on the first album, and the majority of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift have been working together since he contributed to her blockbuster album “1989” from 2014, and he has become her most consistent collaborator. There is a sonic uniformity to much of “The Tortured Poets Department,” however — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato — that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.

As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Midnights,” internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she intones in a bouncy cadence on “Fresh Out the Slammer,” one of several songs that lean too heavily on rote prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: “Florida,” apparently, “is one hell of a drug.” If you say so!

That song , though, is one of the album’s best — a thunderous collaboration with the pop sorceress Florence Welch, who blows in like a gust of fresh air and allows Swift to harness a more theatrical and dynamic aesthetic. “Guilty as Sin?,” another lovely entry, is the rare Antonoff production that frames Swift’s voice not in rigid electronics but in a ’90s soft-rock atmosphere. On these tracks in particular, crisp Swiftian images emerge: an imagined lover’s “messy top-lip kiss,” 30-something friends who “all smell like weed or little babies.”

It would not be a Swift album without an overheated and disproportionately scaled revenge song, and there is a doozy here called “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” which bristles with indignation over a grand, booming palette. Given the enormous cultural power that Swift wields, and the fact that she has played dexterously with humor and irony elsewhere in her catalog, it’s surprising she doesn’t deliver this one with a (needed) wink.

Plenty of great artists are driven by feelings of being underestimated, and have had to find new targets for their ire once they become too successful to convincingly claim underdog status. Beyoncé, who has reached a similar moment in her career, has opted to look outward. On her recently released “Cowboy Carter,” she takes aim at the racist traditionalists lingering in the music industry and the idea of genre as a means of confinement or limitation.

Swift’s new project remains fixed on her internal world. The villains of “The Tortured Poets Department” are a few less famous exes and, on the unexpectedly venomous “But Daddy I Love Him,” the “wine moms” and “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best” who cluck their tongues at our narrator’s dating decisions. (Some might speculate that these are actually shots at her own fans.) “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is probably the most satisfyingly vicious breakup song Swift has written since “All Too Well,” but it is predicated on a power imbalance that goes unquestioned. Is a clash between the smallest man and the biggest woman in the world a fair fight?

That’s a knotty question Swift might have been more keen to untangle on “Midnights,” an uneven LP that nonetheless found Swift asking deeper and more challenging questions about gender, power and adult womanhood than she does here. It is to the detriment of “The Tortured Poets Department” that a certain starry-eyed fascination with fairy tales has crept back into Swift’s lyricism. It is almost singularly focused on the salvation of romantic love; I tried to keep a tally of how many songs yearningly reference wedding rings and ran out of fingers. By the end, this perspective makes the album feel a bit hermetic, lacking the depth and taut structure of her best work.

Swift has been promoting this poetry-themed album with hand-typed lyrics, sponsored library installations and even an epilogue written in verse. A palpable love of language and a fascination with the ways words lock together in rhyme certainly courses through Swift’s writing. But poetry is not a marketing strategy or even an aesthetic — it’s a whole way of looking at the world and its language, turning them both upside down in search of new meanings and possibilities. It is also an art form in which, quite often and counter to the governing principle of Swift’s current empire, less is more.

Sylvia Plath once called poetry “a tyrannical discipline,” because the poet must “go so far and so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of “The Tortured Poets Department” would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.

Taylor Swift “The Tortured Poets Department” (Republic)

Inside the World of Taylor Swift

A Triumph at the Grammys: Taylor Swift made history  by winning her fourth album of the year at the 2024 edition of the awards, an event that saw women take many of the top awards .

‘The T ortured Poets Department’: Poets reacted to Swift’s new album name , weighing in on the pertinent question: What do the tortured poets think ?  

In the Public Eye: The budding romance between Swift and the football player Travis Kelce created a monocultural vortex that reached its apex  at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Ahead of kickoff, we revisited some key moments in their relationship .

Politics (Taylor’s Version): After months of anticipation, Swift made her first foray into the 2024 election for Super Tuesday with a bipartisan message on Instagram . The singer, who some believe has enough influence  to affect the result of the election , has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.

Conspiracy Theories: In recent months, conspiracy theories about Swift and her relationship with Kelce have proliferated , largely driven by supporters of former President Donald Trump . The pop star's fans are shaking them off .

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Mandisa, Grammy-winning singer and 'American Idol' alum, has died at 47

The Associated Press

Mandisa accepts the award for pop/contemporary album of the year at the Dove Awards in 2014 in Nashville, Tenn. Mark Humphrey/AP hide caption

Mandisa accepts the award for pop/contemporary album of the year at the Dove Awards in 2014 in Nashville, Tenn.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Mandisa, a contemporary Christian singer who appeared on "American Idol" and won a Grammy for her 2013 album 'Overcomer', has died. She was 47.

A representative for the singer told The Associated Press that the singer was found dead in her home in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday. The representative said the cause of Mandisa's death was not yet known.

Mandisa, whose full name was Mandisa Lynn Hundley, was born near Sacramento, California, and grew up singing in church. She gained stardom after finishing ninth on "American Idol" in 2006.

As she left, host Ryan Seacrest told the singer that she was "a great spirit on the show."

Mandisa moved on, releasing her debut album in 2007 called "True Beauty," which received a Grammy nomination that year for best pop and contemporary gospel album.

Mandisa: A Singer Waits For Signs That 'It's Christmas'

She went on to release five more albums, including a Christmas album.

In 2014, she won a Grammy for best contemporary Christian music album for "Overcomer," her fifth album.

Mandisa spoke openly about her struggles with depression, releasing a memoir entitled "Out of the Dark: My Journey Through the Shadows to Find God's Joy" in 2022 that detailed her experiences with severe depression, weight-related challenges, the coronavirus pandemic and her faith.

On Friday, the Christian radio network K-Love paid tribute to the singer on social media, saying: "Mandisa struggled, and she was vulnerable enough to share that with us, which helped us talk about our own struggles."

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Taylor Swift releases ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ double album ahead of Record Store Day: Highlights

Catch up on all things 'The Tortured Poets Department':

• Fans celebrated Swift's midnight release of "The Tortured Poets Department" with listening parties and themed gatherings . Many critics praised Swift in their reviews.
• Swift surprised fans at 2 a.m. ET with news of 15 extra songs.
• The album features collaborations with Post Malone and Florence + the Machine. Swift described writing the album as deeply personal. "Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it," she said.
• NBC News' resident Swifties stayed up to blog the biggest takeaways after the album's release.

Vinyl industry rep says pandemic-era manufacturing bottlenecks have eased

"The Tortured Poets Department" is set to be released in special-edition "ghost"-colored vinyl, available both directly through Swift's website and exclusively at Target.

During the pandemic, that might have alarmed vinyl record buyers. As vinyl plants shuttered and employees were sidelined, vinyl production ground to a halt, causing reports of weekslong backlogs and orders going unfulfilled outright.

But in an interview with NBC News on Friday, Dustin Blocker, president of the Vinyl Records Manufacturing Association, said those issues have been resolved and that suppliers now have more than enough capacity to handle any orders coming their way, including massive ones like Swift's.

"In Q3 2023, we saw the [production] timeline start to go back to normal," Blocker said. "And in Q4 it really got back to normal. Now, everyone, including the huge plants, takes only 8-12 weeks [to produce] ... so it's very good news for everyone."

Blocker said any price increases on the supply side sparked by the bottlenecks have essentially reversed.

So, the $40 price tag on the Target edition of "TTPD" is most likely the result of choices made by Swift, her label and the retailer, he said.

Jack Antonoff is sharing BTS pics

Saba Hamedy

Jack Antonoff is giving Swifties what they want: more content.

The Bleachers frontman, who is also Swift’s longtime collaborator and friend, shared pictures of Swift and collaborators on the album, including Florence Welch .

The acting U.S. secretary of labor has a question for Taylor

Acting U.S. Labor Department Secretary Julie Su has a key question for Taylor Swift and her "Tortured Poets Department":

"Is this department unionized?" she wrote in a post on X .

Su, 55, has served as acting secretary since March 2023; she has faced stumbling blocks to being confirmed full time for the role over her perceived pro-union bias .

Destin celebrates Swift shoutout

Nicole Duarte

The city of Destin, Florida, is here for the Swiftie boost.

Google searches for the beach town shot up minutes after Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” was released. The album mentions Destin in the song “Florida!!!” featuring Florence + The Machine.

The city is celebrating the shoutout:

As is Destin's mayor:

Trump gets a question on Taylor

Vaughn Hillyard

A reporter who is part of the pool following Donald Trump on Friday at his hush money trial was able to get in a question to the former president about the new albums.

Trump didn't engage.

Taylor Swift reveals ‘Dateline’ as an inspiration for ‘Florida!!!’

Maddie Ellis, TODAY

Taylor Swift has taken over radio stations, from Channel 13 on SiriusXM to iHeartRadio briefly renaming itself to iHeartTaylor and sharing messages from the songwriter.

Swift revealed in a soundbite played on iHeartRadio that “Florida!!!” — the eighth track of the album and featuring Florence + the Machine — was inspired by “Dateline.”

“I’m always watching, like ‘Dateline,’” Swift said with a laugh. “People, you know, have these crimes that they commit where they immediately skip town and go to Florida. They try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in.”

It’s the same with heartbreak, she said.

“I think when you go through a heartbreak, there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘I want a new name. I want a new life,’” she said.

Or perhaps in Swift’s case — a new era?

Read more at TODAY.com.

The double album appeared to avoid leaks

Kaetlyn Liddy

The standard edition of "The Tortured Poets Department" is said to have been leaked ahead the album's release. The origin of the apparent leaks is unclear, but none of the songs on the extended "anthology" version of the album seem to have been compromised.

Leaks of major artists' work sometimes occur when physical copies of the album arrive prematurely at record stores or department stores, before the tracks are released on streaming platforms. Fans suspect the surprise drop of the double album was a factor in the 15 extra tracks avoiding leaks.

The extra content was so unexpected that the lyrics of the anthology version have yet to be uploaded to Spotify .

‘The Tortured Poets Department’ broke a Spotify record in 12 hours

"The Tortured Poets Department" is already Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day this year, edging out Beyoncé's "Cowboy Carter" in less than 12 hours, Spotify confirmed to NBC News.

Swift currently holds the all-time record for most streams in a day by album and by artist for 2022's "Midnights."

Who are The Blue Nile? About the Scottish band named by Swift

In the album's ninth track — "Guilty as Sin?" — Swift name-drops a beloved '80s Scottish band, The Blue Nile.

"Drowning in The Blue Nile. He sent me 'Downtown Lights.' I hadn’t heard it in a while," Swift says in the song.

"Downtown Lights," released in 1989, was the peak of The Blue Nile's commercial success in the U.S., with the song reaching No. 10 on the Billboard American Modern Rock Tracks chart. 1989 is also Swift's birth year and the title of her fifth studio album.

Known for their avoidance of publicity, The Blue Nile has released just four albums since forming in 1981.

Fans share their theories and joy on social media

It wouldn't be a new Taylor Swift album without fans wondering who it's about or decoding the names mentioned in each song. (Who is Cassandra , Taylor?)

That speculation will surely continue, but now that the album is out, fans can't believe their luck. Reactions on social media praised the sonic and lyrical range of the album, saying that "everybody gets everything," whether you listen to Swift for her synth-pop hits or her intimate folk songs.

Author and creator John Green couldn't wait to wake up his daughter to tell her she gets 31 new Taylor Swift songs today.

By the numbers: Will Taylor Swift break her own album sales marks?

Dania Kalaji

“The Tortured Poets Department” blasted to No. 1 on the U.S. iTunes album sales chart following its release. But will it live up to the success of her previous discography?

Here are all of Swift’s bestselling albums in the U.S. ranked to date, according to data from the Recording Industry Association of America.

“Fearless” (2008): 10 million units

“1989” (2014): 9 million units

“Red” (2012): 7 million units

“Taylor Swift” (2006): 7 million units

“Speak Now” (2010): 6 million units

“Reputation” (2017): 3 million units

“Lover” (2019): 3 million units

“Midnights” (2022): 2 million units

“Folklore” (2020): 2 million units

“The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection” (2008): 1 million units

“Evermore” (2020): 1 million units

TikTok rolls out new features to celebrate new album

Daysia Tolentino

As Swifties show their love for "The Tortured Poets Department" on TikTok, they have the chance to be featured in a "Fan Spotlight" carousel that highlights videos with the #TORTUREDPOETSDEPARTMENT hashtag.

TikTok released a "Taylor Swift In-App Experience" that serves as a landing page for all things "TTPD." Fans can complete challenges in exchange for limited-edition "TTPD" profile frames and some Taylor-related searches unlock animations inspired by the album. Searches for "Taylor Swift," "Taylor Nation," and "The Tortured Poets Department" lead fans to the landing page.

The features are particularly notable because Swift's music was pulled off the platform earlier this year as part of a disput between TikTok and Universal Music Group, though many of her tracks returned earlier this month .

Fans on TikTok have already been loving "TTPD," sharing numerous theories , tears and rankings .

Swift's song 'Fortnight' with Post Malone hits No. 1 on Apple

Jason Abbruzzese

That didn't take long.

The song "Fornight" off Swift's new album quickly hit No. 1 on Apple's top song chart. It features rapper and singer Post Malone.

Swift also took the next four spots with "The Tortured Poets Department," "So Long, London," "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toy," and "Down Bad."

The National's Aaron Dessner on working with Swift: 'some of the most lyrically acute, intricate, vulnerable and cathartic' songs

Aaron Dessner, a musician who is part of the rock band The National, posted to Instagram about working with Swift on the album along with a pic of her in a studio.

He said that he has now worked with swift on more than 60 songs, including 17 across her newest release.

"I am forever grateful to Taylor for sharing her insane talents with and trusting me with her music. I believe these songs are some of the most lyrically acute, intricate, vulnerable and cathartic Taylor has ever written and I am continually astonished by her skills as a songwriter and performer," he wrote, adding in thanks to a long list of other artists and producers.

Will Swift break her own streaming records?

The October 2022 release of Swift's 10th studio album, "Midnights" shattered records on Spotify and Apple Music.

"Midnights" became Spotify's most-streamed album in a single day with 184.6 million streams when it debuted. Swift also broke the record for most-streamed artist in a single day on Spotify with 228 million streams.

The album also become the biggest album of all time by a female artist in Apple Music history by first-day and first-week streams worldwide.

Can Swift outdo herself?

Will Swift's album inspire a new college course?

As Swift became increasingly synonymous with American pop culture, universities around the country started creating entire courses dedicated to studying her lyricism and impact.

Some courses focus on Swift as a business and marketing mastermind, while others analyze her storytelling techniques with all the detail and skill of poetry analysis.

Time will tell whether this new album will inspire yet another college course. Our guess is with all the literary references, it's sure to be on some professors minds.

Read more in NBC News' article here .

Saturday is Record Store Day

The release of "The Tortured Poets Department" will come just in time for a notable day in the music industry calendar: Record Store Day on April 20. The annual event has been observed since 2007 to celebrate independent record stores and is often accompanied by exclusive drops by major artists.

Swift has yet to announce a special event, but the date is marked in the TTPD Timetable on her Instagram, suggesting she might have something up her sleeve.

Swift describes new album: 'Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.'

Patrick Smith

Taylor Swift has offered fans a glimpse into the creative process behind "The Tortured Poets Society" and the emotions that inspired it.

In a press release Friday morning to accompany the new release, the artist said:

"The Tortured Poets Department. 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.

"This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted.

"This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.

"And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry."

To sleep or stream? Swifties question staying up even later

Can you wait until the morning to listen to the 15 extra songs on Swift's anthology?

If you answered no, you're not alone. Online, fans joked that they didn't expect to get this little shut eye.

Among the fans: Gen Z Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla.

"I got votes in the morning. Do I sleep or listen" he wrote .

Others had similar thoughts.

"TAYLOR I HAVE A JOB OH MY GOD" wrote one fan, tagging the artist on X .

"lol Taylor I have to get up early to run errands before work please" wrote another X user.

Leave it to Swift to give us adrenaline to keep us all up a little longer.

'The Tortured Poets Department' becomes Swift's longest album

With the surprise release of 15 additional songs, "The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology" has 31 tracks.

That now makes it Swift's longest album, edging ahead of "Red (Taylor's Version)" by just one track.

A list of all 15 of the extra 'Anthology' songs

• “The Black Dog”
• “imgonnagetyouback”
• “The Albatross”
• “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus”
• “How Did It End?”
• “So High School”
• “I Hate It Here”
• “thanK you aiMee”
• “I Look in People’s Windows”
• “The Prophecy”
• “Cassandra”
• “The Bolter”
• “The Manuscript”

Surprise: a double album!

"The Tortured Poets Department" is a secret DOUBLE album.

In a 2 a.m. ET surprise, Swift announced an extra 15 songs.

"I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology," she wrote on X . "15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours."

It's 2 a.m.

Now what, Taylor?

ICYMI: Swift's powerhouse publicist Tree Paine gets profiled by WSJ

Swift's longtime publicist, Tree Paine, whom many fans know by name, was the subject of a lengthy Wall Street Journal article published Thursday ahead of the new album's release.

While she declined to be interviewed for the story, it delves into how she became one of the most powerful people in the entertainment industry since she joined Swift's camp in 2014.

“There isn’t a publicist in NY, LA or Nashville that wouldn’t jump at an opportunity to work with someone as talented as Taylor Swift and her management team,” Paine said at the time, according to the New York Post .

Read the full story here.

Couples are now wary of Swift's 'Lover' as a love song

Elena Nicolaou, TODAY

“Lover” — at least until recently — was widely received as one of Swift’s classic love songs. When the album of the same name came out in 2019, its title single was declared  first dance song material , or even a “ wedding waltz .”

In the song, Swift paints a portrait of quiet intimacy. Her wild “Red” days, of thrilling romances with highs and lows and uncertainties in between, had settled into something steadier with one person, captured by a simple chorus: “You’re my, my, my, my lover.”

But that interpretation is now in question, as Swift recasts some of her songs in a different light. Ahead of the release of “The Tortured Poets Department,”  she released five playlists on Apple Music , sorting old songs into groups inspired by the five stages of grief, or “heartbreak.”

Aaron Dessner is credited as a songwriter on five of 16 tracks

Dessner, who is a member of the bands The National and Big Red Machine, is one of two producers who worked on "The Tortured Poets Department."

He's credited as a songwriter on five of the 16 tracks on the standard album.

Dessner first collaborated with Swift on her eighth studio album, “Folklore,” for which he shared in the Grammy win for album of the year. He made several guest appearances with Swift on the U.S. leg of the Eras Tour, joining her onstage during the acoustic set for performances of songs they wrote together.

Here's what some critics are saying in their reviews

Angela Yang

The critics have spoken. Here's a roundup of some of their takeaways on "The Tortured Poets Department."

Billboard ’s Jason Lipshutz praised Swift’s boldness for releasing a “knowingly messy, wildly unguarded breakup album” at what’s arguably the peak of her career. It's more mature than her past heartbreak albums, he writes, and “not everyone will love it, but the ones who get it will adore it fiercely.”

Variety ’s Chris Willman wrote that the album can serve as an “unapologetically dramatic” soundtrack to listeners’ own heartbreaks.

Labeling it Swift’s most personal album yet, Rolling Stone ’s Rob Sheffield described it as “the cathartic confession of a woman who thought she had adulthood — and adult romance — all figured out, only to find herself realizing she knows nothing.”

And unlike on past albums, Swift doesn’t portray herself as a victim in this one, wrote the Los Angeles Times ’ Mikael Wood. Instead, the album emanates “a proudly villainous energy as Swift embraces her messiest and most chaotic tendencies.”

Jack Antonoff, Swift's longtime collaborator, posts love for album

Antonoff, Swift’s longtime collaborator and friend, shared his love for the new album on X .

"Love this album more than I can say," wrote Antonoff, who worked on “The Tortured Poets Department” as a producer.

Antonoff also co-wrote eight of the album's tracks.

Swifties are starting to post reax on X

In typical fashion after a Swift album drops, reactions from fans are pouring in online, and they TEND TO COME IN ALL CAPS.

As any Swiftie will tell you, listening to new music from the artist always proves to be a collective emotional experience.

Spotify appears to be holding it together (so far)

The last time Swift debuted a brand-new album, Spotify crashed. No major issues so far this time around.

Shoutout to the engineers and people behind the scenes who are probably working overtime to make sure Swifties don't panic.

We have a new countdown

Don’t go to bed yet! Taylor Swift’s Instagram page is displaying a new countdown to 2 a.m. ET. This wasn't on the timetable ...

Swift releases statement after album drop

In her first social media post after “The Tortured Poets Department” was released, Swift shared a statement about the album online.

These songs reflect her experiences from a moment in time that was equally “sensational and sorrowful,” she wrote, adding that it is a chapter now closed.

“Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it,” Swift wrote. “And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.”

Who is Clara Bow?

Daniel Arkin

The 16th and final track on the album is named for Clara Bow, one of the leading lights of Hollywood’s silent era.

Bow, unlike a lot of stars from the 1920s, managed to successfully pivot to roles in talkies by the end of the decade. She co-starred in “Wings” (1927), which today is probably best known as the first movie to win the Oscar for best picture.

I’m not a Swiftie, so I don’t have much insight into how Taylor’s music connects to Bow’s acting career — but I’m curious how this track will be interpreted by the die-hards.

The album is here

BRB, we’re busy listening with the rest of y’all.

You can now choose a Swift-themed chat for your Instagram DMs

Instagram users can now set their direct message conversations to a new chat theme inspired by “The Tortured Poets Department.”

Bars, venues hold special Swift parties

On the eve of Swift’s album drop, event venues across the country (and around the world) hosted release parties so Swifties could get their first listen of the “The Tortured Poets Department” on the dance floor.

At Pianos in New York, music from across Swift’s discography will play until the new album drops at midnight. Attendees are encouraged to come in themed outfits and friendship bracelets, and the bar will be serving Swift-inspired cocktails.

In Los Angeles, El Cid is hosting a listening party complete with fan-made merch, giveaways and a themed wall for photos. Attendees can also expect performances from drag queen Jade Jolie, who appeared in Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” music video.

Several Swiftie-themed events are also being held across the Washington, D.C., area, according to The Washington Post, which compiled a list .

A Swiftie mom and daughter are hosting their own album party

Kristie Gilmore, 36, is ready to celebrate with her daughter, who was born shortly after Swift's “1989” album and has been a Swiftie ever since.

Gilmore decorated her Boston-area apartment with balloons, signs and stickers in the color palette of “The Tortured Poets Department.” She sprinkled the table with handmade confetti of the album’s logo and made TTPD-themed “membership cards” for themselves and each of her daughter’s friends.

“They’ve been counting down since Taylor announced this album,” Gilmore said, adding, “They’re just hanging out, having a dance party. They’re gonna try to stay up till midnight and listen to it.”

What are the track lengths?

The average track length on “The Tortured Poets Department” is 4 minutes and 4 seconds, making it the third longest album across Swift’s discography.

The longest song is “But Daddy I Love Him,” which clocks in at 5 minutes and 40 seconds.

“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” is the shortest song, at 2 minutes and 36 seconds.

Travis Kelce shared his early thoughts about the album

Ahead of the Super Bowl, Swift's boyfriend, Travis Kelce, the star tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, weighed in on the new album.

“I have heard some of it, yes. It is unbelievable,”  Kelce said . “I can’t wait for her to shake up the world when it finally drops.”

The couple , who have become the internet's favorite love story , were most recently spotted at Coachella 's first weekend.

Taylor Swift beat reporter speaks to NBC's Hallie Jackson

USA Today’s Taylor Swift reporter , Bryan West, spoke with NBC News about the album drop and all the Easter eggs being spotted by fans.

Swift's music is back on TikTok despite UMG dispute

Kalhan Rosenblatt

Some songs that Swift fans know “All Too Well” returned to TikTok this month, months after they were removed.

The songs were among the many tracks Universal Music Group pulled off TikTok after the label and the platform  failed to reach an agreement  this year. (UMG has no relationship to NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)

UMG, known as one of the “Big Three” global music companies, cleared its music from TikTok in late January, saying it was doing so because of a lack of compensation for artists and songwriters. TikTok previously fired back at UMG, accusing the company of putting “their own greed above the interests of artists and songwriters.”

The economics of 'The Tortured Poets Department'

Doha Madani

Die-hard Taylor Swift fans will be spending a pretty penny on her latest album release as she releases four variants of the album with one exclusive track each.

Each variant of “The Tortured Poets Department” is named after the bonus song found at the end of the album: “The Manuscript,” “The Bolter,” “The Albatross” and “The Black Dog.” If a fan wanted to collect them all, the minimum for $13.99 CDs at a store would cost at least $55.96 before taxes.

Longtime Swifties are already familiar with her tendency to provide deluxe editions, as anyone who was around for her original “1989” release can recall the Target exclusive that included three bonus tracks and three voice memos recorded by Swift. 

Her “Midnights” release included a Target exclusive track that was added to streaming only months later, and in May she released a new song on “Midnights (The Late Night Edition).” But this is the first time Swift has put an exclusive song on each individual variant, with no clear timeline for when they might be added to streaming. 

2024: The year of Post Malone and the pop girlies

Rebecca Cohen

Fresh off of a collab with Beyoncé on "LEVII'S JEANS" from her now-famed "Cowboy Carter," Post Malone finds himself on another major release of 2024: Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department."

He joins Swift on the album's first song, "Fortnight." Swift announced that "Fortnight" would be the album's lead single and the song for which she is releasing a music video 8 o'clock tomorrow night.

"I’ve been such a huge fan of Post because of the writer he is, his musical experimentation and those melodies he creates that just stick in your head forever," Swift wrote on social media. "I got to witness that magic come to life firsthand when we worked together on Fortnight."

While best known for more rap-focused songs, Post Malone is clearly making the rounds in the pop music scene, having also recently collaborated with Noah Kahan on "Dial Drunk." But his back-to-back appearances on arguably two of the biggest albums from pop artists this year raise the questions: Is Post Malone becoming a pop girlie? Is he just having a moment? Or is it all of the above?

There's a book about Swift's impact headed to bookshelves

Rolling Stone writer and music historian Rob Sheffield's book "Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music" will debut Nov. 12.

He's expected to dive further into Swift’s music and fan connection.

Swifties are celebrating with their own listening parties

Many Swifties are sharing their elaborate party setups online as they prepare to celebrate the album release at home.

Karen Rothdeutsch, 25, has decked out her bedroom in upstate New York with “The Tortured Poets Department”-themed decorations, complete with a platter of homemade cupcakes decorated to match Swift’s various vinyl variants.

“I just made my space a little more immersive for my first listen,” Rothdeutsch told NBC News. “I’ll be sitting in my bed with a box of tissues and a notebook, writing down my thoughts and probably checking into Twitter every so often to see what everybody’s thinking about it.”

She said she procured the decorations over the course of several weeks, but the whole setup cost her less than $100. While she decorates on a budget, she said she did splash out on the vinyl variants and collector’s edition CDs.

Swift's new album is already breaking a Spotify record

Spotify said on X that the “The Tortured Poets Department” became the most pre-saved album countdown page in the streaming service’s history.

Since its launch on March 28, TTPD's countdown page has ticked down to the album’s drop, now just hours away.

Was Swift's Grammys dress a 'Fortnight' Easter egg?

The white gown Swift wore to the 2024 Grammys, where she announced "The Tortured Poets Department," appears to have been an Easter egg.

Swift appears to be wearing a very similar dress in the teaser for the "Fortnight (feat. Post Malone)" music video, which will debut 8 p.m. ET tomorrow.

Swift was also pictured hugging Post Malone at the ceremony. Some fans online pointed out a similar shot of the two singers that appears in the teaser for the music video.

Swift drops 'Fortnight' music video teaser

Swift blessed fans with a teaser for “Fortnight (feat. Post Malone)," the album's first single.

"At this hearing, I stand before my fellow members of The Tortured Poets Department with a summary of my findings. Album tonight. Fortnight music video tomorrow at 8pm et," Swift wrote in a post on X , which was accompanied by a short video clip.

The black-and-white teaser gave a sneak peak of the visuals for the music video. It's a combination of dramatic period gowns and a bleak medical setting in this supercut that is reminiscent of "Poor Things," which Swift's longtime friend Emma Stone recently won the best actress Oscar for.

Swift had announced she'd be dropping a music video at 8 p.m. ET tomorrow by sharing a “TTPD Timetable” on her Instagram page this week.

Merch is here — and already selling out

Hours before the album’s release, themed merchandise for “The Tortured Poets Department” is now available to order online.

The merch drop includes hoodies, crewnecks and gold jewelry branded with the album’s logo. A display case for the album vinyls seemingly sold out within minutes.

ICYMI: The Eras Tour concert film is on Disney+

In case you need something to do as you count down to the new album, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” is on Disney+. Swift announced the film would be available for streaming in February.

The film features all songs from the three Los Angeles tour dates during which it was filmed at SoFi Stadium. They include “cardigan,” as well as four additional acoustic surprise songs from the tour: “I Can See You,” “Maroon,” “You Are in Love” and “Death by a Thousand Cuts.”

Swifties online are freaking out over purported ‘leaks’

The internet was at it again this week, with some online circulating what they said were leaks of Swift's new album. It is unclear from where and when the apparent leaks originated, but one Reddit thread is already filled with commentary.

As early as Tuesday, "taylor swift leak" appeared to be blocked from searches on X. Instead, when a user tried to search the phrase, a blank page popped up with the message, "Something went wrong. Try reloading."

The secret message has been decoded

The sixth and final word of the secret message, “mortem,” was revealed today, hidden in the lyrics of the song “Begin Again.”

The complete secret message is: “We hereby conduct this post mortem.”

In a collaboration with Apple Music, Swift sorted some of her existing songs into thematic playlists , along with audio messages from her.

The messages seemed to confirm some fans’ theories that the playlists mirrored the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — indicating that the new album may grapple with grief or loss. Swift later used a song from each playlist to reveal a hidden word on Apple Music every day leading up to the release of “The Tortured Poets Department.”

Swift sets fans loose on an international puzzle

Swifties had a big day yesterday after murals with QR codes were unveiled in cities around the world, including Mexico City, Paris and Chicago.

Fans stumbled upon the murals, which Swift had not announced, and scanned them to find a link to a YouTube Shorts video. Every mural had a unique code that led to a different video, each revealing a new letter as part of a word puzzle.

Fans came together online to help decode the puzzle, which seemed to hint at the new album's first track, because it spelled out "for a fortnight."

Swifties in Los Angeles flock to Spotify pop-up library

Many Los Angeles Swifties celebrated the new album with a pop-up library installation in partnership with Spotify.

The three-day event, which runs through today at The Grove, featured a sneak peek at some of the album's lyrics.

Fans posted videos of themselves lined up for hours to get a glimpse at the installation.

A manuscript was front and center at the installation, revealing new lyrics periodically as the pages were turned over the course of three days.

Many fans online tried to identify other potential Easter eggs in the pop-up library, such as a bust of a peace sign, quill and fountain pens and a globe that appeared to be pointing to Florida, the name of a track on the album.

Why is the album called 'The Tortured Poets Department'?

Fans were quick to note that “The Tortured Poets Department” is the longest title for a Taylor Swift album by a large margin, a distinction previously held by her third album, "Speak Now." Before "TTPD," "Speak Now" was her only album title consisting of more than one word.

Speculation surrounding the new album and its uncharacteristic title has primarily revolved around Swift’s  2023 breakup  with British actor Joe Alwyn after their six-year relationship.

After the album announcement, a  2022 Variety interview  between Alwyn and Paul Mescal resurfaced on X. The pair revealed in the interview that they were both members of a WhatsApp group chat titled the Tortured Man Club, prompting some fans to  draw parallels  between Alwyn and Swift’s upcoming album.

The true meaning of “The Tortured Poets Department” remains to be seen, but the album's rollout has featured references to famous poems like Charles Baudelaire’s “The Albatross,” among other literary references.

Clues keep coming

Speculation continues to grow over clues for lyrics, song titles and the album’s first music video.

Not much from Miss Swift so far

It's been a notably quiet rollout for "The Tortured Poets Department."

No themed Instagram grid overhaul, no lead singles, not even a cryptic calendar leading Swifties on wild goose chases for potential Easter eggs.

A week before the release, Taylor Swift was rocking out at Coachella instead of feeding her fans who are desperate for a hint of what's to come.

Aside from a hand-painted QR code on the side of a building in Chicago, a planned exhibit at The Grove in Los Angeles in partnership with Spotify and a quick video released Tuesday that appears to leave the "Midnights" era in the dust as viewers tour The Tortured Poets Department, Swift has been silent on what we can expect.

In the video , posted to her Instagram account, we did get a glimpse of a schedule that only showed release day, and on it, the promise of a music video on Friday at 8 p.m. ET. Fourteen tick marks beneath led some to think the music video could be for the 14th track on the album, or for the leading song, "Fortnight," since a fortnight is 14 days.

Swifties believing in the latter theory proved to be correct. Swift announced that the music video would be for "Fortnight" in a Thursday afternoon social media post.

Swifties online continue to grasp for any details to try to figure out what this mastermind might have in store for her beloved fan base.

What songs are on the new album?

Here's what songs are on the track list.

• "Fortnight (feat. Post Malone)"
• "The Tortured Poets Department"
• "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys"
• "So Long, London"
• "But Daddy I Love Him"
• "Fresh Out the Slammer"
• "Florida!!! (Florence + the Machine)"
• "Guilty as Sin?"
• "Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?"
• "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)"
• "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart"
• "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived"
• "The Alchemy"
• "Clara Bow"

Swift has also announced four bonus tracks: "The Manuscript," “The Bolter,” “The Albatross” and “The Black Dog.” Each bonus track will be available on a separate vinyl variant and won't be on the streaming version of the album.

When does 'The Tortured Poets Department' drop?

Swift's 11th studio album, "The Tortured Poets Department," will be released Friday at 12 a.m. ET, or 9 p.m. PT.

It will be available for purchase on vinyl, on cassette, as a digital album and in CD form. It will also be on several streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music.

But if you plan to stream “The Tortured Poets Department” right after its release, be prepared for potential delays. When Swift’s most recent brand-new album, “Midnights,” was released, Spotify  briefly crashed  because of intense demand.

Angela Yang is a culture and trends reporter for NBC News.

Doha Madani is a senior breaking news reporter for NBC News. Pronouns: she/her.

Rebecca Cohen is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.

is culture and trends editor for NBC News Digital.

Taylor Swift Renews Her Vows With Heartbreak in Audacious, Transfixing ‘Tortured Poets Department’: Album Review

By Chris Willman

Chris Willman

Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

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Now, everyone gets to go back on “Red” alert. “ The Tortured Poets Department ” gives everyone a full dose of the never-getting-over-it Taylor that no one really wanted to get over. As breakup albums go, it’s a doozy, as they would have said back in Clara Bow’s day — an unapologetically dramatic (if often witty) record that will be soundtracking untold millions of tragic rifts to come. If you’ve been putting one off, now might not be a bad time to schedule it.

For where it sits in her catalog musically, it feels like the synth-pop of “Midnights,” with most of the feel-good buzz stripped out; or like the less acoustic based moments of “Folklore” and “Evermore,” with her penchant for pure autobiography stripped back in. It feels bracing, and wounded, and cocky, and — not to be undervalued in this age — handmade, however many times she stacks her own vocals for an ironic or real choral effect. Occasionally the music gets stripped down all the way to a piano, but it has the effect of feeling naked even when she goes for a bop that feels big enough to join the setlist in her stadium tour resumption, like “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.”

The first time you listen to the album, you may be stricken by the “Wait, did she really just say that?” moments. (And no, we’re not referring to the already famous Charlie Puth shout-out, though that probably counts, too.) Whatever feeling you might have had hearing “Dear John” for the first time, if you’re old enough to go back that far with her, that may be the feeling you have here listening to the eviscerating “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” or a few other tracks that don’t take much in the way of prisoners. Going back to it, on second, fifth and tenth listens, it’s easier to keep track of the fact that the entire album is not that emotionally intense, and that there are romantic, fun and even silly numbers strewn throughout it, if those aren’t necessarily the most striking ones on first blush. Yes, it’s a pop album as much as a vein-opening album, although it may not produce the biggest number of Top 10 hits of anything in her catalog. It doesn’t seem designed not to produce those, either; returning co-producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner aren’t exactly looking to keep her off the radio. But it’s easily among her most lyrics-forward efforts, rife with a language lover’s wordplay, tumults of sequential similes and — her best weapon — moments of sheer bluntness.

Who is the worst man that she delights in writing about through the majority of the album? Perhaps not the one you were guessing, weeks ago. There are archetypal good guy and bad boy figures who have been part of her life, whom everyone will transpose onto this material. Coming into “Tortured Poets,” the joke was that someone should keep Joe Alwyn, publicly identified as her steady for six-plus years, under mental health watch when the album comes out. As it turns out, he will probably be able to sleep just fine. The other bloke, the one everyone assumed might be too inconsequential to trouble her or write about — let’s put another name to that archetype: Matty Healy of the 1975 — might lose a little sleep instead, if the fans decide that the cutting “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and other lacerating songs are about him, instead. He might also have cause to feel flattered, because there are plenty of songs extolling him as an object of abject passion and the love of her life — in, literally, the song title “LOML” — before the figure who animated all this gets sliced down to size.

The older love, he gets all of one song, as far as can be ascertained: the not so subtly titled “So Long, London,” a dour sequel to 2019’s effusive “London Boy.” Well, he gets a bit more than that: The amusingly titled “Fresh Out the Slammer” devotes some verses to a man she paints as her longtime jailer (“Handcuffed to the spell I was under / For just one hour of sunshine / Years of labor, locks and ceilings / In the shade of how he was feeling.” But ultimately it’s really devoted to the “pretty baby” who’s her first phone call once she’s been sprung from the relationship she considered her prison.

It’s complicated, as they say. For most of the album, Swift seesaws between songs about being in thrall to never-before-experienced passion and personal compatibility with a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. She feels “Guilty as Sin?” for imagining a consummation that at first seems un-actionable, if far from unthinkable; she swears “But Daddy I Love Him” in the face of family disapproval; she thinks “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” before an epiphany slips out in the song’s hilariously anticlimactic final line: “Woah, maybe I can’t.” Then the most devastating songs about being ghosted pop up in the album’s later going.

Now, that, friends, is a righteous tirade. And it’s one of the most thrilling single moments in Swift’s recorded career. “But Daddy I Love Him” has a joke for a title (it’s a line borrowed from “The Little Mermaid”), but the song is an ecstatic companion piece to “That’s the Way I Loved You,” from her second album, now with Swift running off with the bad choice instead of just mourning him. It’s the rare song from her Antonoff/Dessner period that sounds like it could be out of the more “organic”-sounding, band-focused Nathan Chapman era, but with a much more matured writing now than then… even if the song is about embracing the immature.

The album gets off to a deceptively benign start with “Fortnight,” the collaboration with Post Malone that is its first single. Both he and the record’s other featured artist, Florence of Florence + the Machine , wrote the lyrics for their own sections, but Posty hangs back more, as opposed to the true duet with Florence; he echoes Swift’s leads before finally settling in with his own lines right at the end. Seemingly unconnected to the subject matter of the rest of the record, “Fortnight” seems a little like “Midnights” Lite. It rues a past quickie romance that the singer can’t quite move on from, even as she and her ex spend time with each other’s families. It’s breezy, and a good choice for pop radio, but not much of an indication of the more visceral, obsessive stuff to come.

The title track follows next and stays in the summer-breeze mode. It’s jangly-guitar-pop in the mode of “Mirrorball,” from “Folklore”… and it actually feels completely un-tortured, despite the ironic title. After the lovers bond over Charlie Puth being underrated (let’s watch those “One Call Away” streams soar), and over how “you’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith,” an inter-artist romance seems firmly in place. “Who’s gonna hold you like me?” she asks aloud. (She later changes it to “troll you.”) She answers herself: “Nofuckinbody.” Sweet, and If you came to this album for any kind of idyll, enjoy this one while it lasts, which isn’t for long.

From here, the album is kind of all over the map, when it comes to whether she’s in the throes of passion or the throes of despair… with that epic poem in the album booklet to let you know how the pieces all fit together. (The album also includes a separate poem from Stevie Nicks, addressing the same love affair that is the main subject of the album, in a protective way.)

There are detours that don’t have to do with the romantic narrative, but not many. The collaboration with Florence + the Machine, “Florida!!!,” is the album’s funniest track, if maybe its least emotionally inconsequential. It’s literally about escape, and it provides some escapism right in the middle of the record, along with some BAM-BAM-BAM power-chord dynamics in an album that often otherwise trends soft. If you don’t laugh out loud the first time that Taylor’s and Florence’s voices come together in harmony to sing the line “Fuck me up, Florida,” this may not be the album for you.

When the album’s track list was first revealed, it almost seemed like one of those clever fakes that people delight in trolling the web with. Except, who would really believe that, instead of song titles like “Maroon,” Swift would suddenly be coming up with “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” “Fresh Out the Slammer,” “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”? This sounded like a Morrissey track list, not one of Swift’s. But she’s loosened up, in some tonal sense, even as she’s as serious as a heart attack on a lot of these songs. There is blood on the tracks, but also a wit in the way she’s employing language and being willing to make declarations that sound a little outlandish before they make you laugh.

Toward the end of the album, she presents three songs that aren’t “about” anybody else… just about, plainly, Taylor Swift. That’s true of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” a song that almost sounds like an outtake from the “Reputation” album, or else a close cousin to “Folklore’s” “Mad Woman,” with Swift embracing the role of vengeful witch, in response to being treated as a circus freak — exact contemporary impetus unknown.

Whatever criticisms anyone will make of “The Tortured Poets Department,” though — not enough bangers? too personal? — “edge”-lessness shouldn’t be one of them. In this album’s most bracing songs, it’s like she brought a knife to a fistfight. There’s blood on the tracks, good blood.

Sure to be one of the most talked-about and replayed tracks, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” has a touch of a Robyn-style dancing-through-tears ethos to it. But it’s clearly about the parts of the Eras Tour when she was at her lowest, and faking her way through it. “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday — every day,” she sings, in the album’s peppiest number — one that recalls a more dance-oriented version of the previous album’s “Mastermind.” It’s not hard to imagine that when she resumes the tour in Paris next month, and has a new era to tag onto the end of the show, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” might be the new climax, in place of “Karma.” “You know you’re good when you can do it with a broken heart,” she humble-brags, “and I’m good, ‘cause I’m miserable / And nobody even knows! / Try and come for my job.”

Not many superstars would devote an entire song to confessing that they’ve only pretended to be the super-happy figure fans thought they were seeing pass through their towns, and that they were seeing a illusion. (Presumably she doesn’t have to fake it in the present day, but that’s the story of the next album, maybe.) But that speaks to the dichotomy that has always been Taylor Swift: on record, as good and honest a confessional a singer-songwriter as any who ever passed through the ports of rock credibility; in concert, a great, fulsome entertainer like Cher squared. Fortunately, in Swift, we’ve never had to settle for just one or the other. No one else is coming for either job — our best heartbreak chronicler or our most uplifting popular entertainer. It’s like that woman in the movie theater says: Heartache feels good in a place like that. And it sure feels grand presented in its most distilled, least razzly-dazzly essence in “The Tortured Poets Department.”

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Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is hauntingly brilliant, even the 15 surprise songs

Taylor Swift ’s vulnerability is her superpower.

From the glorified diary entries of her 2006 debut to her 2024 album of the year Grammy winner “Midnights," she has proudly worn her heart on her sleeve.

That heart is bloodied and battered, but ultimately beating on “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift’s 11th studio album that she surprise announced while collecting the first of two more Grammys in February.

Then came a bigger surprise when, at 2 a.m. Friday, Swift declared that "TTPD" was really a double album, with "The Anthology" tacked onto the the title and the addition of 15 songs to join the initial 16.

These 31 pensive pop tracks are the antithesis to “Lover.” Heartbreak and misery wrapped in melody. Rainbows faded into sepia tone. An era endured not enjoyed.

"TTPD" is bookended with a prologue – a poem by Stevie Nicks – and an epilogue framed as Swift’s summary report as the chairman of The Tortured Poets Department (Chaos, “leads the caged beast to do the most curious things,” she writes).

As she grapples with blame for the fizzling of a six-year relationship, she isn’t worried about pride. Former boyfriend Joe Alwyn is the obvious unnamed antagonist in most songs ("My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys"), though Swift shoulders plenty of culpability ("The Tortured Poets Department" title track).

With these songs, Swift pulls listeners into the depths of misery catalyzed by a public breakup while she staged the biggest concert tour in history. It's an exploration of extremes told with intimate details. Is this her “Tapestry" ? Her “Blue" ? Her “Like A Prayer" ?

Maybe the old guard still isn’t ready to anoint Swift to the echelon of Carole King and Joni Mitchell (Madonna? Absolutely). But “TTPD” springboards off Swift’s vibrant storytelling on “Folklore” and “Evermore” and spotlights the open-hearted confidence she presented on those musically minimalist albums.

Swifties can exhaust themselves excavating lyrical clues in the F-bomb-dropping “Down Bad” (“If I can’t have him, I might die”) and surmise if “But Daddy I Love Him” is funny or cruel (“I’m having his baby. No I’m not, but you should see your faces”), but it hardly matters.

Like the most successful artists in history – The Beatles and Beyoncé, perhaps – Swift is untouchable. Critic proof. Adored whether she unveils a masterpiece or a stopgap collection of songs.

“TTPD” falls closer to masterpiece territory, if not musically – similar cadences and production from Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner coat many songs with the same sheen – then lyrically.

It’s a bonafide headphones album, best experienced in the quiet to fully absorb the sadness and exasperation in Swift’s voice when she sings in the resentful “So Long, London,” (“I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free”) and her ache on the melancholy piano ballad “Loml,” which will make your heart feel raked over with nails.

What guests does Taylor Swift have on her new album?

Post Malone is dancing closely to the fire known as "Call John Legend For a Feature" with his high-profile drops not only on Swift’s album, but Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter.”

While he offered a pedestrian contribution with Beyoncé, Posty fares better on “Fortnight,” the opening song on “TTPD” which he co-wrote with Swift and Antonoff.

A gentle thrumming in the background cushions Swift's darkly funny lyrics (“I was a functioning alcoholic ‘til nobody noticed my new aesthetic”) while Post Malone dips into the mesmerizing rhythm with some sweet vocals.

It’s also one of two songs to namedrop Florida. But the second, “ Florida!!! ,” co-written by and co-starring Florence Welch, is the standout, with Swift and Welch trading vocals over a stomping backbeat that is both cinematic and purposeful.

More: Taylor Swift name-drops Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas on new song. Here’s why

While it’s impossible to out-lyricize Swift, Welch nudges impressively close with her self-penned contribution: “Barricaded in the bathroom with a bottle of wine, well, me and my ghosts had a hell of a time.”

These two are ideal companions, musically and philosophically.

‘I Can Do it With a Broken Heart’ is one of Swift’s best Trojan horses

Synths flutter, an electro-pop beat pulses and the melody is structured as one of Swift’s trademark glistening pop gems.

But then the lyrics of “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart” kick in and Swift travels through the most potent psychological exploration of “the show must go on” since Smokey Robinson and The Miracles described “The Tears of a Clown” in 1967.

“I’m a real tough kid,” Swift sings, defiant as ever. “They said baby, gotta fake it til you make it … and I did.”

With humor and grace, Swift unfurls the anguish she hid while remaining very visible the past year, including blasting through an awe-inspiring three-hour show several nights a week on her world-spanning Eras Tour. But the song achieves liftoff with the dichotomy of Swift’s honeyed voice and her chant-singing, “I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday, every day.”

It’s a clever entry into the complexity of mental health, and Swift, she of limitless ambition, flips her sorrow into something constructive, a Superwoman unbowed by pesky things like misery.

“I cry a lot but I am so productive,” she chirps, tongue firmly in cheek. “It’s an art … you know you’re good when you can do it with a broken heart.”

The capper is Swift declaring, “I’m miserable and no one even knows it!” as she laughs through the end of the song. But after recognizing what she’s endured, even her giggles lacerate.

More: All 11 of Taylor Swift's No. 1 songs ranked ahead of her 11th album release

Who is Clara Bow?

One of the most intriguing songs on “TTPD” is named for a 1920s-era silent film star and the layers run deep (paging all excavating Swifties!)

Is the choice of an actress who was seen and not heard on film a metaphor for her life with Alwyn, a cornerstone of which was privacy?

Or, as Swift sings from an observational post, does she merely resemble the alluring dark-lipsticked 20 th century star?

The wispy ballad finds Swift mimicking the words she (possibly) heard in her upstart years, such as “You look like Stevie Nicks ,” before the storyline comes full circle with a new rookie being told, “You look like Taylor Swift … you’ve got edge, she never did.”

It’s meta, yes, but Swift often subscribes to glancing back to lunge forward – always saturated in poetic sensitivity.

What is ‘The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology’?

The 15 additional songs Swift dropped a mere two hours after providing an emotional wallop with the first batch include four of the tracks already announced as bonuses: “The Manuscript,” “The Bolter,” “The Albatross” and “The Black Dog.”

Among the others, Swift is especially pointed on the gently swelling acoustic guitar-based “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” a song that seemingly references her fling with Matty Healy (she laments being unable to save someone who “needed drugs” and was always just out of reach).

Her strongest vitriol, however, is reserved for “Thank you, Aimee,” which fans surmise digs into her feud with Kim Kardashian . But Swift is bold and forthright when schooling “Aimee” about her success in spite of criticisms – a familiar, if still welcome, page from Swift’s playbook.

A trio of “name” songs – “Cassandra,” “Peter” and “Robin” – are all winsome ballads couched in pretty piano melodies. “Peter” is especially endearing with its waltzing rhythm and Swift’s warm vocals on this ode to a childhood friend (“The goddess of timing once found us beguiling,” she sings).

But a highlight is the bouncy “So High School,” which finds Swift singing and strumming guitar with the breezy glow of ‘ 90s-era Sheryl Crow. Is her focal point current paramour Travis Kelce ? Lyrics including “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle” and “I feel so high school every time I look at you,” are significant indications. But more importantly, the song pulls Swift out of the sludge and into the sun.