Taylor Swift Announced She’s Dropping A Surprise Album At Midnight

Surprise! Taylor Swift is releasing a new album this week, one she wrote and recorded entirely in isolation.

The world has less than one day to prepare for “Folklore,” Swift’s eighth studio album. The pop titan announced its sudden release on Twitter on Thursday morning.

“Most of the things I had planned this summer didn’t end up happening,” she wrote, likely referencing her canceled tour for her August 2019 album, “Lover.” “But there is something I hadn’t planned on that DID happen.”

Apparently, that thing was “Folklore,” an album Swift said she’s “poured all of [her] whims, dreams, fears and musings into.” She wrote and recorded the whole thing in isolation, she said, but she had help from cowriters like Bon Iver, the Grammy Award-winning indie crooner, and the prolific producer and songwriter and frequent Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff.

Gone are the days of Swift’s usual album release tactics — weeks of hinting and countdown clocks, Instagram scrubbing and the theorizing among diehard fans. Less than one year ago, Swift released “Lover” with many of those tactics, including changing her Instagram color scheme and teasing song titles in magazine covers. But the world she released “Lover” into in August 2019 looks quite different now.

“Before this year I probably would’ve overthought when to release music at the ‘perfect’ time, but the times we’re iving in keep reminding me tht nothing is guaranteed,” she wrote. “My gut is telling me that if you make something you love, you should just put it out into the world. That side of uncertainty I can get on board with.”

Swift has stayed semi-quiet in 2020 since the release of her Netflix documentary, “Miss Americana,” in January. On Thursday night, though, she’ll kick off the album’s release with the music video premiere of “Cardigan,” a new song Swift said also wrote and directed the music video for.