Ask any Taylor Swift fan where they were on August 28, 2022, and they will give you one of two answers.
One, they were tragically asleep.
Two, they were wide awake and staring at an animation of a purple clock on Taylor Swift’s website, watching the minute hands count down to midnight.
The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Only minutes before, Taylor Swift had gone up on stage at the 2022 MTV VMA Awards to accept the “Best Video of the Year” award and dropped a bombshell in her speech that not even VMA producers were aware of.
“And I had sort of made up my mind that, if you were going to be this generous and give us this, I thought it might be a fun moment to tell you that my brand new album comes out October 21st,” Swift said to thunderous applause. “And I will tell you more at midnight.”
Swift’s Instagram immediately updated with a link to the mysterious clock animation with the cryptic words “Meet Me at Midnight.”
The 23 minutes I waited until midnight felt like an eternity. My fellow Swiftie friends texted me frantically, and my Twitter feed lit up—even Tiktok already blew up with fans coming up with theories.
The excitement was palpable as the clock neared midnight, and for a good reason.
Taylor Swift had been relatively silent throughout 2022 thus far, only appearing in public a questionably small amount and releasing one original song for the soundtrack of “Where the Crawdads Sing.”
Fans were suspicious that she might continue releasing the re-recorded versions of her older albums after she released the “Taylor’s Version” edition of both her Fearless (2008) and RED (2012) albums in 2021. The inclusion of the rumored ten-minute version of her hit song “All Too Well” on the new edition of RED, along with the accompanying short film, was the whole reason Swift was attending the 2022 VMAs, so it only made sense that she might hint at a new re-release.
But nobody expected an entirely brand-new album.
When midnight struck, the clock disappeared, and an announcement appeared: Midnights, Taylor Swift’s tenth original studio album, is indeed set to drop Oct. 21.
“This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams,” Swift captioned her announcement post on Instagram. “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 album is set to have thirteen tracks, which is ambitious for Swift, whose last album had 30 songs. Thirteen is also known to be Swift’s lucky number since it’s her birthday (December 13th, 1989) and consequently has become a notorious Easter egg in Swift’s work.
The announcement at this year’s VMAs also took place 13 years after the Swift and Kanye West incident at the 2009 VMAs, where West stormed the stage to interrupt Swift’s acceptance speech for “Best Female Video”, thus sparking a scandal and a resulting feud.
Fast forward to 2022, and Swift was on stage to accept an award for a 10-minute-long song to announce her tenth studio album, coming out in the tenth month of the year.
To make matters even more interesting, Swifties quickly pointed out that the release date of Oct. 21 happens to be Kim Kardashian’s birthday—Kanye West’s (now ex) wife.
I don’t know about you, but I know what I’ll be doing at midnight on Oct.21—not sleeping, that’s for sure. Here’s to Taylor Swift continuing her reign as queen of Sad Girl Autumn.
