Taylor Swift announces impending release of new album
A brief clip from the New Heights podcast, hosted by her NFL star boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason, a former NFL player, was posted on Instagram.
A post shared by New Heights (@newheightshow)
Swift's website said physical copies of the album, which is available for pre-order, would be sent out by October 13.
The album is the first since Swift announced in May she had regained control over her back catalogue and follows 2024's The Tortured Poets Department.
Swift ended her billion-dollar, record-breaking Eras Tour in December, having started the mammoth string of dates in March 2023.
Last summer, she made history as the first solo artist to perform at London's Wembley Stadium eight times on a single tour.
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The Guardian
27 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘I'm the one to beat': is Taylor Swift's Showgirl era set to take h to even greater heights?
Taylor Swift's podcast interview with her American football player boyfriend, Travis Kelce, this week yielded plenty of tidbits for fans. Across two hours of loose chat on New Heights, the show Kelce helms with his brother Jason – also a football player – Swift revealed she was obsessed with sourdough and lurked on baking blogs. The couple spent the summer with her family, caring for her 73-year-old father, Scott, after he had a quintuple heart bypass. She gave Kelce a lesson on Hamlet and taught him how to avoid internalising speculation about their two-year relationship. You could call them the tentpoles of the 35-year-old pop star's brand: literary passions and professional self-awareness. One surprising revelation came near the end. Until the record-breaking 149-date Eras tour that Swift mounted from 2023-24, she said she had 'never allowed myself to say: 'You've arrived. You've made it.'' Being the only artist to win the Grammy for album of the year four times hadn't done it; not the records broken, the acclaimed shifts from country to mainstream pop to indie. Nor her staggeringly successful campaign to re-record her first six albums to devalue their master recordings, sold by her first record label to an industry nemesis, and then on to a private equity company. 'But the Eras tour,' she said, 'I was like, this is nothing like what I've experienced before. It was so much better than anything else.' Eras leapfrogged becoming the first billion-dollar tour to become the first $2bn tour. That would be plenty of cause for celebration and a good long rest. So would, as Swift announced in May, finally owning the rights to those first six albums, having successfully negotiated to buy the asset outright. (It ended her re-recording project: her 2006 debut is done and waiting, and she barely started 2017's Reputation.) Her legacy isn't just culturally assured, but materially secure. But Swift evidently isn't ready to let that feeling of having 'made it' go. She appeared on New Heights to announce her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, arriving just 18 months after its predecessor and 10 months after Eras concluded: she is apparently congenitally incapable of rest, with a lot to process. The public will – correctly – have long assumed that Swift has well and truly made it like no one ever has. But the record's promised contents, intentions and release strategy are set to make Swift – and Kelce alongside her – hysterically famous at a new level, capitalising on and shifting industry norms in a way that may leave her detractors researching bunkers in which to hide from it all. Swift's new album does not arrive until 3 October, but this week's edition of the industry newsletter Record of the Day led with a tongue-in-cheek congratulations to 'everyone at EMI and Taylor Swift on her latest No 1 album The Life of a Showgirl'. Supernova success is a foregone conclusion: last year's introspective The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) was the first album to pass a billion streams in its first week, reaching 1.76bn. Swift is beloved on an unfathomable scale. She is one of the last monocultural pop stars. You suspect she could have toured Eras for five years and still sold out every night. Her devout Swifties, casual pop fans and curious rubberneckers will likely propel Showgirl past TTPD's record, such is the critical mass behind her, no matter what it sounds like. Her reign, says Annie Zaleski, the author of Taylor Swift: The Stories Behind the Songs, is unprecedented because 'she's so consistent and continuing to evolve'. But on the podcast, Swift sounded surprisingly aware of the limitations of TTPD – too wordy, too long, too downbeat – and keen to course-correct. That project, she said, had been about 'catharsis', 'mess' and 'rawness' following an apparently humiliating fling with the 1975's Matty Healy. TTPD comprised 16 songs; and on release day, Swift dropped a previously unannounced 15-track sister album, The Anthology. For Showgirl, she said she craved 'focus and discipline': just 12 songs going behind the scenes of her Eras life, with 'melodies that were so infectious you're almost angry'. She made a surprising admission about her recent quality control: 'Keeping the bar really high is something I've been wanting to do for a very long time.' Swift recorded Showgirl with the Swedish co-producers Max Martin and Shellback in Stockholm around Eras' spring 2024 European run. The second of her three dates in the Swedish capital was the 89th date of the Eras tour: she named her fifth album, partly produced by the Swedes, 1989 after her birth year. Given the endless number games she plays, sowing numerology clues for fans setting up her future movements, you can assume the scheduling was no accident. Martin and Shellback co-produced Red (2012), 1989 (2014) and Reputation (2017), homes to her biggest pure-pop smashes, among them Style, 22, and Blank Space. Her first subsequent album without them, 2019's playful Lover, was regarded as ending that imperial period. Since then, Swift's music has grown more muted and experimental, often in collaboration with the producers Jack Antonoff and the National's Aaron Dessner, as if she were trying to carve out a sustainable future for a 30-something songwriter: 2020's folksy Folklore and Evermore, the dusky pop of 2022's Midnights, TTPD. They spawned no comparable radio hits; her biggest in recent years is Lover's Cruel Summer, never officially released as a single but adopted as a fan favourite. Swift now seems to be framing those records as a phase – her art school years. The Showgirl era seems to be an attempt to recapture the kind of musical ubiquity where little kids yell your lyrics at birthday parties, as they did with 2014's Shake It Off and now do with songs such as Chappell Roan's Hot to Go! 'My business is making music and taking care of my fans and I have ways of monitoring what they want from me and how best to entertain them, which is my job,' she told the Kelces. Eras was divided into segments reflecting each of her albums (except her 2006 debut): imagine it as a 149-night focus group. Swift's monitoring also cannot have failed to note that her brand of hermetically sealed, grown-up pop has been ceding ground to Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli xcx, who have seized culture's centre with less inhibited and far rowdier hits than the exacting Swift has ever made. Or perhaps ever could: one insurmountable difference is that Roan and xcx are unlikely to ever monitor fan desire or cater to it. And Martin, despite being second only to John Lennon and Paul McCartney for having the most US No 1 singles, has waned as a hitmaker. 'I don't think she can get ahead of those artists because she's such a millennial pop star,' said a publicist for comparably superstar acts who asked to remain nameless. 'She can't create trends like those younger artists because they have a lot less to lose.' There is a sense that Swift is catching up: that she's clocked criticisms, read the room. She released 19 physical variants for TTPD, and was accused of exploiting fans and damaging the environment with excess vinyl production, a practice Billie Eilish has called 'wasteful'. Showgirl appears to have a fairly industry-standard four. She is also competing with herself: if there is a tour, says the music business expert Eamonn Forde, it will have to take a significantly different form to Eras – residency-style, perhaps Vegas or in a bespoke venue, as recently done by Adele – to avoid unfavourable comparisons to the biggest tour of all time. Swift drew mass media coverage for her appearances at Kelce's games with the Kansas City Chiefs, prompting some aggrieved football fans to boo whenever she appeared on the jumbotron. In a trailer for her episode of New Heights, traditionally a sports show, Swift joked: 'I think we all know that if there's one thing that male sports fans want to see in their spaces and on their screens, it's more of me.' Unluckily for them, the brand-building between Kelce and Swift looks set to make their association unavoidable. New Heights is part of their lore: after Kelce tried and failed to land a meeting with Swift after an Eras show, he told listeners he wanted to meet her. Intrigued, she took him up on it. The synchronicity began. It can be no mistake that Kelce's cover of GQ magazine landed the same week as Swift's podcast. Meanwhile, Swift rarely gives interviews: New Heights offers a mutually beneficial space where the couple wield full control, albeit with a soft touch: giving cute disclosures, such as his love of wild otters or her running to tell him about getting her masters back when he was gaming with the boys. The moment capitalised on the prevailing trend for A-listers to reserve their media engagements for fairly fannish video podcasts, making traditional journalists fear for their jobs as they dutifully write up any news lines. Premiering Wednesday night in the US, the episode livestream crashed; within 24 hours it had 13m YouTube views, not including other podcast platform stats. The value to advertisers is huge, especially in anticipation of future Swift revelations. And Kelce, a comparatively old player at 35, is rumoured to be retiring after the coming season – his 13th year, Swift's lucky number – so will be power-brokering his post-game career. He admitted to GQ he had literally taken his eye off the ball, with underwhelming stats in his past two seasons, because he was chasing other opportunities. 'It's his Steven Bartlett, Diary of a CEO move,' said the publicist. 'It's future-proofing their lives. He can't be a football player for ever; she can't be a pop star for ever. It makes them a unit – look at how it worked for the Beckhams.' After a backlash around 2015-16 resulting from her beef with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Swift managed to convincingly reboot her brand: a dedicated, literary songwriter who fights for artists' rights. To onlookers outside the NFL, Kelce's is ripe for shaping from two years of dating Swift. The couple are clearly conscious of this: Kelce told GQ he had 'become way more strategic in understanding what I am portraying to people', something you may imagine constitutes pillow talk in a business-minded household. 'No man has ever said those words,' said the publicist. Kelce's image is openhearted romantic. Notably, he is Swift's first significant boyfriend to seem undaunted by her celebrity – her previous six-year relationship with the British actor Joe Alwyn took place almost entirely in private. A sweet aspect of the New Heights episode was two beefy jocks being so excited by and supportive of a girly pop star. Swift joked of his public entreaty to date her that 'this is sort of what I've been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager'. The couple riffed on memes questioning Kelce's intelligence – 'it's so hot when she says big words,' he said when Swift called Folklore 'esoteric' – which is in itself very smart: positioning Kelce as lovable and non-threatening. Swift said she immediately warmed to him for not being 'judgmental', describing him as 'a vibe booster in everyone's life … like a human exclamation point'. The implication is that he could pep up your sentences if you let him into your heart. Kelce's post-football business is being everyone's boyfriend, not just Swift's. His pesky family ties to Maga Trumpists won't hurt him in the US; if Swift, who endorsed Kamala Harris in the last election, were to be questioned about this, 'her argument can be that she's the leftwing voice in these rooms', the publicist said. Win-win. Although Swift seemed keen to establish some distance from the voluble TTPD era, a song from The Anthology about her and Kelce's relationship seems to outline her present mindset. 'I'm making a comeback to where I belong,' she sings on The Alchemy. 'Ditch the clowns, get the crown / Baby, I'm the one to beat … These blokes warm the benches / We've been on a winning streak.' That streak is assured: next year marks the 20th anniversary of Swift's self-titled debut, and she will inevitably release the re-recording to mark the occasion. Showgirl's successor will be her 13th album, a significant moment in her lore. There are rumours of a behind-the-scenes Eras documentary to complement the record-breaking concert movie, extending the moment's IP. Any new tour will once again recalibrate the live industry. Before Swift drops a note of music, or Kelce touches grass, they're the coming season's reigning champions.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
There's nothing worse than male trouser trouble
First, there was the bizarre tale of the poor unfortunate man who, after dropping his trousers on the District line near Upton Park, was set upon by an outraged gang, beaten and then forcibly expelled from the Tube. And then, just a day or so before, the perpetually beleaguered Gregg Wallace caused a similar degree of opprobrium when he put out a video in which he addressed allegations of bad behaviour involving a lack of trousers. What on earth is going on? On Instagram, Wallace announced, with a touch of the Beowulf poet: 'Would you like the truth about the stories regarding me taking my trousers down, listen! There are no findings in the investigation that I took my trousers down in front of anybody.' He ended his video by repeating, sternly: 'Any claim that the report says differently is not true.' So there we have it. Gregg Wallace may be many things, but he is not a trouser-dropper – unlike the anonymous semi-flasher on the Underground, who definitely was, has now been detained for his own good under the Mental Health Act. A warning, perhaps, to those of us who, now that the weather is becoming disconcertingly warm once again, might fancy a little impromptu chino removal on public transport for our comfort. Yet in truth, the idea of taking down one's trousers is an innate source of English fascination that has been a staple of comedy since Chaucer and Shakespeare, and is likely to remain so until the day we are all wafting round in unisex kimonos. The reason why trousers – more than any other form of attire – are imbued with such comic potential is that the average English gentleman associates them with his dignity. Lose them, and his sang-froid tumbles to the floor along with the fabric. It was no wonder that the Aldwych farces and Carry On films all made considerable weather of their stiff, not-so-buttoned-up characters being compelled to cover their reduced dignity in increasingly absurd circumstances as their breeches sally off into the sunset. I would like to say that the loss of trousers is something that only occurs on stage and in film, but alas, I can testify that it is all too real. In my home city of Oxford, I have seen many cruelly abandoned pairs of formal trews in the street, presumably after a heavily misspent night involving fine wine. Nor is this limited to the young. A friend tells how, after a wild evening on Clapham Common with some newfound friends resulted in his being debagged, he cycled past the scene of the crime the next day to see his once-beloved slacks fluttering mournfully in the wind – the mute observer to whatever unspeakable things had happened in that particular spot. As for the shame's memorialisation in memoir, another friend – a leading light in the entertainment industry – has confessed that, should he ever put finger to keyboard and write his autobiography, it could only be called A Life Without Trousers, so torrid have his exploits in this field been. I would dearly love at this point to confess that I know nothing of such things, but unfortunately I recently had my own narrow brush with infamy. A few months ago, I was strolling along Hampstead Heath with my family when, to our horror, a tree fell just behind us, nearly causing grave hurt, or worse. We scrambled to safety just in time, with no worse injury than a few cuts and bruises – but as I realised that we were largely unharmed, I also realised that the sudden impact on the ground had sent my kecks cascading round my knees. To be found dead and trouserless on Hampstead Heath: now that, I fear, is the end that many of my enemies would wish on me. But I intend to give them the dissatisfaction of continuing to live – with the bottom of my trousers rolled – for many a well-furnished year to come, God willing.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Kylie Jenner stuns fans with shock move amid Timothee Chalamet breakup rumors
has shocked fans with her latest move amid Timothee Chalamet breakup rumors. The 28-year-old beauty mogul - who recently sported a racy look for a girls' night out - has been embroiled in split speculation with the actor, 29, after the pair were last seen together over five weeks ago. However, the TV personality seemingly proved that all is well between the two when she reportedly liked Timothee's latest Instagram post on Wednesday, per E! News. While Daily Mail could not verify if Kylie had liked or possibly unliked the post, her mom Kris and sister Kendall's likes are still on full display on the post. He uploaded a new trailer for his upcoming film Marty Supreme, and they also showed their support for the Oscar-nominated star. It comes after the stars were last spotted together on July 5 during a vacation to St. Tropez, France. While Daily Mail could not verify if Kylie had liked or possibly unliked the post, her mom Kris and sister Kendall's likes are still on full display on the post The actor was also notably absent from Kylie's birthday celebration which took place over the past weekend. However, the reason for the pair's 40 days apart has now been explained. Timothee has been busy filming the sequel Dune: Part Three in Hungary, where he plays the character Paul Atreides in the third installment of the Dune franchise. 'Timothee is busy making a movie and the schedule is grueling because he is in so many scenes, he is the star,' a source told Daily Mail. 'So he has to be very focused and together to do his best work.' Even from a distance, the reality star gives him all the support he needs, added the insider. 'She helps him out as much as she can, like give him space to work and have her private jet on standby in case he needs to go somewhere fast.' The source continued, 'Kylie is a good girlfriend to him. She is always there and wants him to be happy, and if that means he has to be overseas for a few months, she is OK with it, she will wait. She also secretly jets off to see him when she can. 'Of course she misses her man and her heart hurts when he is not near, but she makes it work.' Timothee has been shooting in Budapest for the third Dune film, with his other co-stars being Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Robert Pattinson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Florence Pugh and Jason Momoa. Dune Messiah will be in theatres on December 16, 2026. The IMDB logline for the film is brief: 'The film follows Muad'dib, heir to unimaginable power, as he brings to fruition the ancient scheme to create a superbeing ruler among men, not in the heavens.' Dune Messiah is a 1969 science fiction novel by American writer Frank Herbert, the second in his Dune series of six novels. A sequel to Dune, it was originally serialized in Galaxy magazine in 1969, and then published by Putnam the same year. Kylie and Timothee started dating in January 2023, were rumored to be an item in April 2023 and then they went public with their romance in September 2023. Their first red carpet together was at the 70th David Di Donatello event at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, Italy on May 7, 2025. In early July, Kylie started following Timothee on Instagram. The businesswoman boasts almost 400million followers on the photo-sharing site, but she is quite choosy about who she follows, with only 119 profiles making the cut. However, one of those is now her boyfriend of two years. Fans of TyMothée - the pair's most popular ship name - have been driven into a frenzy after spotting Kylie has allowed the A Complete Unknown actor into her close social circle. However, at the time of writing, the follow is yet to be reciprocated. The actor has 19.7 million Instagram followers, and has only shared 147 posts, compared with Kylie's whopping 7,244 posts. But the Kardashians star shouldn't feel snubbed because he doesn't follow anybody on Instagram. Kylie is mom to Stormi, seven, and Aire, three - whom she shares with ex and rapper Travis Scott. And Timothee has had the chance to meet her children. A source told People in April that the two stars are 'making it work' and added, 'Kylie is truly his biggest fan. 'She would clear her schedule to attend awards and premieres with him. She couldn't be more supportive of his career.' The insider added, 'When they are in LA together, he spends time with her kids too. Her family loves that she's dating him. They have seen such positive changes in Kylie. She's the happiest.' Earlier this month, Kylie celebrated her 28th birthday on August 10 - and jumped to Instagram to share special moments from her intimate bash. She was joined by close family and pals for the special occasion while being able to indulge in more than one sugary cake. One of the desserts was covered in white frosting and colorful sprinkles while the other was covered with raspberries. In the caption of the Instagram carousel, she gave a shout out to her older sister Kendall for planning the party. The group also had a blast painting outdoors and later enjoyed a tasty dinner as well as the yummy cake for dessert. 'best birthday ever!!!!!!! I'm so grateful to my family and friends for making this weekend so special and full of love. 28 feels so good!!!!!' The Kylie Cosmetics founder added, 'and to my sister @kendalljenner thank you from the bottom of my heart for planning everything so perfectly. I'm so lucky to have you.'
