The good news for Taylor Swift fans is the pop star has no shortage of new music headed their way.
While accepting the award for Video of the Year at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday, the pop star used the opportunity to announce her forthcoming record. “I thought it might be a fun moment to tell you that my brand-new album comes out Oct. 21,” she said, promising her fans, “I will tell you more at midnight.” Then at midnight, she posted the cover art for the album, titled Midnights, on Instagram, featuring a photo of her wearing blue sparkly eyeshadow and red lipstick while sparking a lighter, as well as a second shot of her holding her head in her hand in a dimly lit room. Swift wrote alongside the image, “Midnights, the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life, will be out October 21. Meet me at midnight.”
She also shared a passage superimposed over the second image that read, “We lie awake in love and in fear, in turmoil and in tears. We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren’t—right this minute—about to make some fateful life-altering mistake.” Swift added, “This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching—hoping that just maybe, when the clock trikes twelve…we’ll meet ourselves.”
While Midnights seems to be an album full of brand new material, many fans felt that Swift dropped a whole lot of Easter eggs during the VMAs that she would be releasing a re-recorded version of her 2017 album Reputation next. Over the last two years, the singer has released her own versions of 2008’s Fearless and 2012’s Red in an effort to reclaim her music from her former manager Scooter Braun who purchased her masters from her former record label, Big Machine Records, in 2019. In her acceptance speech, Swift said that winning the award was “an indication we did something right.” For many of her listeners, that line immediately rang a bell as it’s similar to one she repeats on the Reputation track “Call It What You Want,” in which she says, “I did one thing right.”
But the bigger clue seems to have been her choice in sparkly attire for the evening which resembled a dress she wore in the music video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” right down to the earrings which she appeared to wear an upside down version of to the VMAs. Swift also gave a look at her final outfit for the awards show on TikTok set to the Blackpink song “Pink Venom,” which was interpreted to be a reference to the snake imagery used throughout Reputation. And others noted that Midnights‘ release date also happens to fall on Kim Kardashian‘s birthday, a woman who was rumored to be the inspiration behind much of Reputation and whom the majority of those snake emojis were leveled at.