Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, has broken the record for Spotify’s most-streamed in a day, the music platform said.
The pop singer also became the most-streamed artist in a single day in Spotify history.
Her album, released on 19 April, contains 31 tracks, which mostly detail her romantic travails – her experiences of love, loss and heartbreak. Only a handful of songs appear to break from this theme.
The first 16 tracks of The Tortured Poets Department dropped as scheduled at 5am in the UK. Just a few hours later, an additional 15 tracks were released to an extended version – The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.
Swift said the album was “an anthology of new works reflecting events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure.”
The post on X continued: “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.”
Swift’s song Fortnight featuring the singer Post Malone became Spotify’s most-streamed song in a single day. The lyrics describe an intense, two-week love affair that she says is “ruining her life”.
“I love you and it’s ruining my life,” she sings, “I touched you for only a fortnight.”
The album also contains tracks including So Long, London, which is thought to be about her ex-partner, British actor Joe Alwyn. Swift, who was with Alwyn for six years, had previously moved to London where he was living.
Another song from The Anthology called thanK you aIMee appears to spell out Kim, which fans have speculated is about recent hostilities with Kim Kardashian and her former husband, Kanye West.
Swift announced her 11th studio album live on stage at the Grammy Awards earlier this year, where she said: “All’s fair in love and poetry”.
The arrival of a new album means there will probably be new material to add to the star’s sold-out Eras tour, which comes to Europe in the summer.
