Taylor Swift revealed the new songs in a social media post at 3 a.m. on Friday morning
Taylor Swift has revealed her “special very chaotic surprise.”
After hyping up the early-morning announcement on her social media earlier this week, the 11-time Grammy winner announced Friday that she is releasing seven extra songs on her new Midnights album under the title Midnights (3am Edition).
The new songs are listed as “The Great War,” “Bigger Than the Whole Sky,” “Paris,” “High Infidelity,” “Glitch,” “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” and “Dear Reader.”
“Surprise! I think of Midnights as a complete concept album, with those 13 songs forming a full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour,” Swift posted on Instagram, early Friday. “However! There were other songs we wrote on our journey to find that magic 13. I’m calling them 3am tracks.”
“Lately I’ve been loving the feeling of sharing more of our creative process with you, like we do with From The Vault tracks,” she added. “So it’s 3am and I’m giving them to you now.”
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Swift’s announcement followed the arrival of her 10th studio album as the clock struck 12 on Friday morning.
After venturing into a metaphorical indie-rock forest for her 2020 sister albums folklore and evermore, Swift is now out of the woods on Midnights, a moody indie-pop concept album she has said was inspired by 13 restless nights.
Sonically, the new record — with its woozy synths, trap beats and drum machines — is most similar to the industrial pop deep cuts of her underrated 2017 LP reputation, with some of the more exciting, experimental moments from Lover and evermore.
And this collection of songs is versatile enough — it could soundtrack a party, a rendezvous with a lover or just a solo night in with a bottle of Malbec.
Thematically, Midnights explores some familiar topics for Swift: love, revenge and public image. On the fantastic album opener “Lavender Haze,” the star sings of her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn and the endless engagement rumors and scrutiny they’ve weathered (“All they keep asking me / Is if I’m gonna be your bride / The only kind of girl they see / Is a one night or a wife”).
With the contemplative love song “Sweet Nothing,” Alwyn (under his pen name William Bowery) receives his sixth songwriting credit on a Swift project.
He’s not the only collaborator on the album, either: Longtime creative partner Jack Antonoff returns as a cowriter and producer. And Lana Del Rey, who has long inspired Swift (see: “Wildest Dreams,” “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince”), joined her to cowrite and deliver vocals on “Snow on the Beach,” a poetic, sweeping rumination on romance with an incredible Janet Jackson shoutout: “It’s like snow at the beach / Weird but f—ing beautiful … Now I’m all for you like Janet.”
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In a separate Instagram post ahead of her 3 a.m. revelation, Swift revealed more about the album’s creation.
“Midnights is a wild ride of an album and I couldn’t be happier that my co pilot on this adventure was @jackantonoff,” she posted Friday. “He’s my friend for life (presumptuous I know but I stand by it) and we’ve been making music together for nearly a decade HOWEVER… this is our first album we’ve done with just the two of us as main collaborators.
“We’d been toying with ideas and had written a few things we loved, but Midnights actually really coalesced and flowed out of us when our partners (both actors) did a film together in Panama,” she added. “Jack and I found ourselves back in New York, alone, recording every night, staying up late and exploring old memories and midnights past.
“We were so lucky to also work with our brilliant collaborators @sam_dew, @sounwave, Lana Del Rey, @jahaansweet, @keanubeats, William Bowery, and @zoeisabellakravitz. @sharp_stick was our excellent engineer. The wonderful and wise @bethgarrabrant took the album photographs. Midnights is a collage of intensity, highs and lows and ebbs and flows. Life can be dark, starry, cloudy, terrifying, electrifying, hot, cold, romantic or lonely. Just like Midnights. Which is out now.”
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