Midnight Sharp: Everything To Know About Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’

Longevity has been one of the important aspects in determining the success of an artist in the music industry. But for Taylor Swift, the Music Industry herself, it was not the case.

Last Friday, October 21, 2022, Taylor Swift dropped her 10th studio album, Midnights, after releasing two consecutive re-recordings since Evermore. The album was first announced on August 29, during her acceptance speech at the VMAs after winning Best Longform Video for the All Too Well: Short Film.

“I had made up my mind that if you were going to be this generous and give us this [award], I thought it might be a fun moment to tell you that my brand new album comes out on October 21,” She said, casually dropping the bomb in her speech.

At midnight, she released the full details on all of her social media accounts. “This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching — hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve… we’ll meet ourselves.”

The standard version of Midnights has thirteen tracks, with the titles announced in a series of thirteen Tiktok videos called “Midnight Mayhem with Me’’. The surprise deluxe version, Midnights (3am Edition) has seven more tracks added.

Some of the fan favorites were Karma, a song addressing the consequences she got after the scrutiny she was under before turned out to be something good and sweet while her nemeses now suffered; Sweet Nothing, a song she and her long-time boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, wrote together with him writing under a pseudonym, William Bowery; and the first three consecutive and the most cohesive tracks of the album: Lavender Haze, Maroon, and Anti-Hero.

After its release, Swift broke Spotify, literally crashing the site and the platform’s records. It hasn’t been out for 24 hours when Midnights broke the record for most-streamed album in a single day in Spotify history, surpassing the record set by Drake’s Lover Boy. It is now also the biggest female debut album of 2022 on Spotify, the record previously held by Beyonce’s Renaissance.

The fun has just begun as Midnights is confirmed to be a visual album, meaning that all of the tracks will each have a music video. Anti-Hero is the first of many music videos to come out, addressing Taylor’s insecurities in a creative yet straight-forward way. “I really don’t think I’ve really dealt this far into my insecurities in this detail before, … I like Anti-Hero a lot because I think it’s really honest.”

What people fail to recognize is that while Taylor is switching to so many genres in her career, from country music to pop to alternative and now electronica and synth-pop, it is the important key to her impact and relevance as an artist of sixteen years — she follows the trend and does it too good that she sets the standard, and she sets it high. The success she garnered was all by design; because she is a mastermind. That’s a real lasting legacy.