Taylor Swift’s newest album, The Tortured Poets Department, was released April 19, and has received some mixed reviews from fans.
Swift announced the album during her speech at the Grammys in early 2024, and fans have been eagerly waiting for the release since. Fans were even more surprised when Swift released another new album: The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology just two hours after the first album was released. In total, Swift released 31 new songs that day.
While most fans are loving the album, there are a few people who are not fans of it. Many listeners have said that The Tortured Poets Department is not lyrically as strong as her previous albums, and it seems like Swift just threw random words together to make her songs. One fan of Swift who is a fan of Swift’s previous work is sophomore Sophia Miller. In fact, she said, “I do believe that the second half [of the album] was better than the first because I liked the production better, and I think the first half sounds slightly repetitive and too similar to previous albums.”
These negative comments have not kept the “Swifties” from their enjoyment of the new album, though. One student who has enjoyed the new albums is sophomore Skylar DuBois-Kleinhans. He said, “I love her new album. I would rank The Tortured Poets Department as my second favorite album of hers because the new songs just can’t surpass my previous favorites.”
The new album is already a huge success for Swift. In the first three days of its release, it broke the previous record for most sales of a vinyl album in a week. The Tortured Poets Department also broke Spotify’s record for most-streamed album in a single day with over 300 million streams. The song “Fortnight” from this new album also broke the record for most streamed song in a single day on Spotify. All of these records and more were all broken within the first week of the album’s release, and The Tortured Poets Department will no-doubt break a few more in no time.
