Taylor Swift Is Dropping A Surprise 9th Album Tonight

This is not a drill — Taylor Swift will be dropping a surprise studio album tonight at midnight

I think we can all agree that 2020 has been, on average, a pretty bad year. But you know what hasn’t been entirely awful this year? Pop stars. Dolly Parton gave us a Christmas album, a COVID vaccine, and the delightfully insane film Christmas on the Square. Ariana Grande is dropping a Netflix concert before the year is over. And Taylor Swift just announced that, at midnight tonight, she’s dropping an entire surprise album.

Is 2020 saved? Well, that’s maybe a little bit of a stretch. But are we going to have some great music and streaming options to help us round out this turd of a year? You bet we are.

Swift announced her surprise album on Twitter this morning, explaining a little bit of the thought process behind deviating from her usual pattern of releasing albums as different “eras” of her life.

“I’ve never done this before,” she wrote. “In the past I’ve always treated albums as one-off eras and moved onto planning the next one after an album was released. There was something different with folklore. In making it, I felt less like I was departing and more like I was returning.”

Swift continued, “To put it plainly, we just couldn’t stop writing songs. To try and put it more poetically, it feels like we were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods and had a choice: to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music. We chose to wander deeper in.”

Swift also reminded fans about her 31st birthday being right around the corner, and implied that the album is a gift — both for fans, and for herself. Thirty-one is, after all, the backward version of 13, her lucky number.

And she added that, for anyone who’s struggling with a lonelier-than-usual holiday season, she hopes new music helps. What an angel.

Swift has some of the most supportive fans in the entire industry, so to say that they’re excited about her big surprise would be just a little bit of an understatement.

Swift says that “Evermore” will be a companion album to her most recent work, “Folklore,” which she also released as a midnight surprise, just five months ago along with the surprise concert on Disney+ last month. She’s also recently revealed that her longtime boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, helped write a number of the songs on “Folklore,” so we can’t wait to see if he was involved with “Evermore,” too. It’s kind of a romantic album name, so it would totally add up, right?

Swift will be releasing the new album at midnight Eastern time, which means that’s when you’ll be able to start streaming it on all major platforms, on repeat, for days. Happy listening!