Welcome to the Midnights era.
Consider this my petition to make every Taylor Swift album release day an international holiday from here on out. I showed up to class early on October 21st with five hours of sleep, a large coffee (to counteract said five hours of sleep), drooping eyelids, and absolutely no motivation to do anything except listen to Midnights. I’m a seasoned Taylor Swift fan, so I’m well-accustomed to the routine of her album releases. Like usual, I dropped everything at 11 p.m., made myself comfortable on the floor, and blasted the new album on my speaker. I let the 13 new songs wash over me, only breaking my awestruck silence to laugh at lyrics like “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby” and “Karma is a cat, purring in my lap ‘cause it loves me.”
However, because Taylor Swift is always 13 steps ahead of us, Midnights was a different beast altogether. The album is both comparable to and vastly different from anything she’s done before. Midnights is a pop album from start to finish, but not the bubblegum pop that characterized 1989. The music was tailor-made (or should I say Taylor-made?) for a club atmosphere, with hundreds of bodies bopping along to the rhythmic beat and sharp-as-glass lyrics in perfect harmony.
Some fans of her more stripped-down works might be surprised that there isn’t one acoustic song on the album. Even ballads like “You’re On Your Own, Kid” and “Labyrinth” are laden with synth sounds and layered harmonies courtesy of Jack Antonoff, producer and partner in crime for this project. I can understand the disappointment that some people may feel, but I think that the consistent heavy production makes Midnights her most cohesive album yet.
With 10 studio albums under her belt, plus two re-released albums, Taylor Swift still manages to blow our expectations out of the water at every turn. Her extensive discography means that she has to take risks with every album, or things might start to feel repetitive. She has proved time and again that she can excel in any genre she sets her sights on, becoming a record-breaking country, pop, and indie artist in the process.
On release night, I’d already mentally prepared for a long night of high emotions and very little sleep, because Taylor had announced that there would be a “special very chaotic surprise” at 2 a.m. I was hoping for a tour announcement or possibly a bonus song, but I wasn’t expecting the seven deluxe songs on Midnights (3 a.m. Edition) that dropped in the wee hours of the morning. I’m glad that the 13-song Midnights got to see the light of day (night?) for three hours because that’s all it’s going to get—everyone and their mother will be listening to the 20-song version from here on out.
I should have known anything was possible (this is the woman who spontaneously dropped not one but two surprise albums in 2021), but somehow I’m still on the edge of my seat every time Taylor Swift does anything. In the past week alone, she broke the records (her own, I might add) for most-streamed album and artist in a day on Spotify, dropped two music videos (complete with Oscar winners and the HAIM sisters), and casually confirmed a tour on Jimmy Fallon. She also sent signed vinyls to independent record stores all around the country (shoutout to Strictly Discs), performed “Exile” with Bon Iver live for the first time, and has probably left hundreds of Easter eggs throughout the process. She’s more productive in a week than the rest of us are in our entire lifetimes.
It’s impossible to confine Taylor Swift to one label, and that’s the beauty of being a Taylor Swift fan: you never know what’s coming next, but you can rest assured that it will be damn good.