As the clock struck midnight on Friday and Spotify streams raged, Taylor Swift dropped a few hints behind the meaning of her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department.
In her first statement since the album’s release, Swift said that she had “no scores to settle” via her music, and described the project as “both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure.”
Reviews, however, are already describing it as a “doozy” of a break-up album.
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In her statement, the pop star reflected on her inspiration for the album without naming it explicitly—though as The Daily Beast previously reported, fans seem to overwhelmingly believe based on Swift’s lyrics that the bulk of the album references Matty Healy, the problematic lead singer of The 1975 once linked to the pop superstar.
The album also appears to reference Joe Alwyn, the British actor whose six-year relationship with Swift reportedly ended last year.
Weighing in on the matter—if obliquely—Thursday night, she said that while the chapter in question is closed, she realized many of the metaphorical wounds she carried were self-inflicted.
She described the music 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.”
She added; “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.”
The Tortured Poets Department, dropped at exactly midnight on Friday, features 16 songs including four bonus tracks–“The Manuscript,” “The Bolter,” “The Albatross” and “The Black Dog.” Only one track is available on each album per physical release. Artists Post Malone and Florence + The Machine also feature on the album.
“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 concluded.
Earlier Thursday, fans went wild over an apparent early leak of the album, sending fans into a frenzy of speculation about the lyrics’ apparent references to Healy.
Once the album was dropped, the conjecture reached a boiling point, though there are seemingly other references to her relationship with Alwyn—whose relationship with the pop superstar reportedly fizzled out last spring, according to Entertainment Tonight, which wrote at the time that the split was “not dramatic... the relationship had just run its course.”
“So Long, London,” is a sad tune about Swift saying farewell to the British city: “I left all I knew you left me at the house by the Heath,” she sings, while in another part, she says, “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”
