Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department – live updates: What critics and fans are saying

Days before Taylor Swift broke the internet with her new album, Michael J Fox has praised her, saying that she “changes the world works”.

Speaking to People for the magazine’s 50th-anniversary issue, the Back to the Future star, 62, admitted that he “didn’t have an opinion about Taylor Swift when I first heard of Taylor Swift”.

“Now I have a wife and four kids who worship her,” he said. “I think she’s going to be a really important person. I think she moves economies, she changes the way the world works, and that’s amazing.”

On “Guilty as Sin?” she sings about “fatal fantasies” for someone from her past who sends her the 1989 song “The Downtown Lights”, by Scottish band The Blue Nile (she might have felt a particular affinity for the song as it was released the year she was born).

Song from new album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ namedrops her ex Matty Healy’s favourite band

Spotify have just announced that The Tortured Poets Department is already their most-streamed album in a single day, with Taylor Swift also becoming the most-streamed artist in a single day in the history of the platform.

It is the first album to ever exceed 200 million streams in a single day. The previous record was also held by Swift, who now has the top three most streamed albums in a single day, with The Tortured Poets Department followed by Midnights and 1989 (Taylor’s Version).

Taylor Swift fans are speculating that she may perform at Coachella’s weekend two after releasing her new album The Tortured Poets Department.

The singer, 34, is rumoured to be performing with her friend and fellow Jack Antonoff collaborator Lana Del Rey this weekend.

It comes after she was spotted enjoying the festival’s first weekend with boyfriend Travis Kelce. Swift was last spotted attending the festival in 2016.

Swift was spotted enjoying the festival’s first weekend with boyfriend Travis Kelce

Hours before Taylor Swift released her new album, Travis Kelce’s ex, influencer Kayla Nicole, addressed some of the criticism she’s seen about her on social media.

“I’m unproblematic. Mind my business,” she tweeted on Thursday (18 April). “Never respond to the constant vitriol. Solid as they come & don’t expect a pat on the back for it either.”

However, she then hit back at the criticism, before asking her followers to put an end to it. “Just know everyone has a breaking point & would love for ‘yall’ (because you know exactly who you are) to leave me alone,” she concluded.

The American football star dated Nicole off-and-on from 2017 to 2022, before Kelce is believed to have started dating Swift in September 2023.

Travis Kelce and Kayla Nicole dated off-and-on from 2017 to 2022

Ahead of the record’s release, Swift partnered with streaming service Spotify to create an open-air library at The Grove in Los Angeles.

The surprise pop-up led to fans scrambling to decipher clues left behind. She also shared a video teaser that follows the camera as it exits the Midnights room and enters the Tortured Poets Department, a stark office with bright white lights.

Pop star teased fans with clues ahead of her new album

Taylor Swift’s new record, The Tortured Poets Department, name-drops a handful of famous names, some expected and some (very much) not.

Swift does much of her name-checking in the album’s title track.

“I laughed in your face and said, ‘You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith,’” she sings, referring to the famous poets. “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’rе modern idiots.”

She then surprised fans when she celebrated fellow artist Charlie Puth, singing: “We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.”

Elsewhere in the song, she appears to mention her frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff and Boygenius’s Lucy Dacus.

“Sometimes I wonder if you’re gonna screw this up with me / But you told Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever leave / And I had said that to Jack about you, so I felt seen,” she sings.

Finally, in her “Clara Bow” song, titled after the late Twenties actor, she also names singer Stevie Nicks. “You look like Stevie Nicks in ’75 / The hair and lips / The crowd goes wild at her fingertips / Half moonshinе, a full eclipse.”

Swift’s ex, The 1975 frontman Matt Healy, has reacted to her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department.

“Matty still thinks very highly of Taylor but we were all nervous about what she might have said on the album,” an insider told US Weekly. They also claimed that Healy “couldn’t be happier” with how Swift’s record turned out.

“Matty’s family knew about the relationship,” the insider said. “And they were worried that Taylor was going to rip him apart. Matty has struggled with life in the public eye, and he’s been doing really well, but the last thing that he needs is for every Swiftie in the world to think he’s a villain.”

Fans expecting a post-mortem of the musician’s six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn have been left surprised, as Swift seems to spend more time dissecting her brief fling with The 1975 frontman

“Over 16 songs (and a second LP), the pop superstar litigates her recent romances,” Zoladz writes. “But the themes, and familiar sonic backdrops, generate diminishing returns.”

Calling it a “curiously insular album”, she adds that it is “often cradled in the familiar, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s production”.

“As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose.”

Days before the release of Swift’s 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, it appeared to have been leaked online sparking a frenzy of debate among fans.

Swifties have branded the leak a ‘slap in the face’ to the artist’s hard work