Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album “Tortured Poets Department” dropped Friday — as a surprise double album totaling 31 songs, no less.
And while many of the pop-fused, Jack Antonoff-produced singles pay ode to Swift’s whirlwind rebound romance with 1975 frontman Matty Healy following the dissolution of her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn, there is a standout track that celebrates the new man in her life, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
Enter “The Alchemy.”
“Shirts off, and your friends lift you up over their heads,” Swift sings on the song’s bridge. “Beer sticking to the floor, cheers chanted ’cause they said / there was no chance, tryna be the greatest in the league. / Where’s the trophy? He just comes running over to me.”
The latter half of the bridge in particular paints a portrait of Swift and Kelce memorably celebrating the Chiefs’ 2024 Super Bowl win on the green for all to see.
“Touch down / Call the amateurs and cut ’em from the team,” goes the chorus. “Ditch the clowns, get the crown / Baby, I’m the one to be / ‘Cause the sign on your heart said / it’s still reserved for me / Honestly, who are we to fight the alchemy?”
Listen to the song in full below.
Early Friday, Swift made the surprise announcement that the hotly anticipated “Tortured Poets Department” would be a double album release, saying she’d “written so much tortured poetry in the past two years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of ‘TTPD: The Anthology.’ Fifteen extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore … It’s all yours.”
In a separate post on X, the Grammy winner described the album 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 wrote. “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.”
The Tortured Poets Department. 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… pic.twitter.com/41OObGyJDW
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) April 19, 2024
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