NEW YORK — Taylor Swift has officially announced her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, just minutes after a mysterious countdown on her website hit zero at 12:12 a.m. Tuesday.
While no release date has been confirmed, Swift’s site notes that vinyl editions will ship before October 13. A special limited vinyl in “Portofino orange glitter” and a cassette version are already available for pre-order.
Fans had been speculating for weeks that Swift’s next era was coming soon. On Monday, Taylor Nation — her official marketing team — posted a TikTok slideshow of 12 images, each showing the singer in orange, with the caption, “Thinking about when she said ‘See you next era…’”
Adding to the buzz, the “New Heights” podcast, hosted by Swift’s boyfriend and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce alongside his brother Jason Kelce, teased a Wednesday episode with an orange image and a shadowy figure. Hours later, the show confirmed Swift would appear, releasing a clip of her pulling the new album from a briefcase. As on her website, the cover art remains blurred.
The Life of a Showgirl follows last year’s The Tortured Poets Department, which was announced at the 2024 Grammys and released during her record-breaking world tour. That tour earned over $2.2 billion across two years and five continents, making it the highest-grossing tour in history.
This will be Swift’s first release since regaining full ownership of her music catalog. In May, she revealed she had purchased her original recordings — initially released under Big Machine Records — from Shamrock Capital, though the sale price was not disclosed.
In recent years, Swift has been rerecording her first six albums after losing control of them in a sale to Hybe America CEO Scooter Braun. Her “Taylor’s Version” re-releases have included unreleased songs, hidden messages, and fresh visuals, all topping the Billboard 200 upon release.
So far, she has released four rerecorded albums: Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) in 2021, followed by Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) in 2023. The latter cemented her record as the woman with the most No. 1 albums in history.
