Yesterday Taylor Swift released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, and announced it as a surprise double album. Fans and Swifites spent the day decoding the songs, with many messages devoted to parsing if a song was about Swift’s ex-partners. Earlier today, the pop star dropped the album’s first music video for the single Fortnite, co-written by Post Malone, featuring Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles, and Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto.
Taylor Swift releases Fortnight music video
Taylor Swift has released the music video for Fortnight from her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. The track features Post Malone as her ex-lover, with Swift appearing trapped in her own space. Post Malone attempts to save Swift, and by the end of the video, she breaks free, burning poems and breaking windows.
“When I was writing the Fortnight music video, I wanted to show you the worlds I saw in my head that served as the backdrop for making this music,” the singer wrote on Instagram amid the music video’s release.
“Pretty much everything in it is a metaphor or a reference to one corner of the album or another. For me, this video turned out to be the perfect visual representation of this record and the stories I tell in it. @postmalone blew me away on set as our tortured tragic hero, and I’m so grateful to him for everything he put into this collaboration,” she added.
Elsewhere in the footage, Dead Poets Society stars Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles also make cameos as what appear to be scientists, with Taylor Swift as their test subject.
“I’m still laughing from getting to work with the coolest guys on earth, @ethanhawke and @mrjoshcharles (tortured poets, meet your colleagues from down the hall, the dead poets),” Swift added in her post.
Ahead of the release of the Fortnight music video, Swift shared on Instagram, “I’ve been such a huge fan of Post because of the writer he is, his musical experimentation, and those melodies he creates that just stick in your head forever. I got to witness that magic come to life firsthand when we worked together.”
Swift’s eleventh album, The Tortured Poets Department, featured 16 songs. However, two hours after its initial release, she released a double album expansion, The Anthology, featuring 15 more songs.
“It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album,” Swift wrote on Instagram. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”
The Tortured Ports Department broke multiple records
Less than 24 hours after its release, The Tortured Poets Department broke multiple records on Spotify, becoming the audio giant’s most-streamed album in a single day. Swift also became the most-streamed artist in a single day in Spotify history.
On Tuesday, Swift teased the Fortnight music video with a clip of The TTPD Timetable featuring an audience POV tour of a schoolhouse setting, with a calendar noting the video’s drop on April 19. On Thursday, she wrote beneath a second tease, “At this hearing, I stand before my fellow members of The Tortured Poets Department with a summary of my findings.”
At the time of the initial album’s release, Swift referred to the record as “an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions, and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time—one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure.” “This period of the author’s life is now over; the chapter closed and boarded up,” she continued.
“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.” Spotify also revealed on Thursday that the album became the most pre-saved album on the Countdown Page in the history of the audio streamer.
ALSO READ: Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department In Summation: Check Out Full Prologue Poem HERE
