Bonus tracks, new video, a Spotify crash: Swift’s ‘Midnights’ is full of surprises

Taylor Swift launched a midnight buffet of spoils early Friday following the release of her latest album, “Midnights.” Among the goodies? Seven bonus tracks and a music video for the song “Anti-Hero.”

Announcing the project in August and teasing it for weeks with playful gimmicks on TikTok, Swift delivered her 10th full-length studio album at the stroke of midnight (Eastern time) — and caused Spotify to crash briefly.

Then, three hours after the release, the global superstar dropped an additional seven tracks, granting feverish fan wishes and causing revision headaches for music critics who had already published their reviews of the album.

The 32-year-old dubbed the new songs the “3am tracks” and had alluded to the surprise drop earlier as a “special very chaotic surprise.” The songs were written during the album’s conception, she said.

Music

Out of the woods, Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ heralds the return of a pop-music mastermind

After two rootsy pandemic albums, ‘Midnights’ picks up right where 2014’s ‘1989’ and 2017’s ‘Reputation’ left off.

Oct. 20, 2022

“Surprise! I think of Midnights as a complete concept album, with those 13 songs forming a full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour. However! There were other songs we wrote on our journey to find that magic 13,” she tweeted very early Friday.

“I’m calling them 3am tracks. Lately I’ve been loving the feeling of sharing more of our creative process with you, like we do with From The Vault tracks. So it’s 3am and I’m giving them to you now.”

The bonus tracks are: “The Great War,” “Bigger Than the Whole Sky,” “Paris,” “High Infidelity,” “Glitch,” “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” and “Dear Reader.”

Music

Here’s how Taylor Swift’s prolific run of albums stacks up against the all-time greats

‘Midnights’ will be Swift’s fourth new album in as many years (six including her remakes of older LPs). Her only competition? Prodigious legends from the ‘70s.

Oct. 18, 2022

Three of the tracks — “The Great War,” “High Infidelity” and “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” — prominently feature Aaron Dessner of the National, who worked closely on Swift’s twin pandemic albums, the Grammy-winning “Folklore” and its follow-up, “Evermore.” The other four feature the work of Jack Antonoff, her frequent collaborator who produced “Midnights.”

In his review for The Times, critic Mikael Wood wrote that “Midnights” “returns to an earlier Swift mode in both sonic and lyrical terms.”

“This 13-track set, which she produced with her longtime creative partner Jack Antonoff, feels like it picks up right where 2014’s ‘1989’ and 2017’s ‘Reputation’ left off, with slick, beat-heavy arrangements that seem dimly aware of hip-hop’s existence and with lyrics peppered with juicy allusions to Swift’s various high-profile feuds and love affairs,” he wrote.

×

“Anti-Hero,” which Swift has said is her favorite song she’s ever written, delves deep into her insecurities and her struggle with her “unmanageably sized” life. Set to Antonoff’s buzzing synths and booming ’80s-rock drums, Swift weighs the public’s harshest opinions of her, copping to a “covert narcissism” and admitting that sometimes she feels like “a monster on the hill … slowly lurching toward your favorite city,” Wood wrote.

And now it comes with another music video that Swift wrote and directed. Equal parts spooky and kitschy, the new video was shot by Rina Yang, who also worked on Swift’s “All Too Well” video, and features Swift as its antihero/protagonist, along with Mike Birbiglia, John Early and Mary Elizabeth Ellis as her spoiled future children and daughter-in-law, respectively, squabbling at her funeral.

“Watch my nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts play out in real time,” Swift tweeted upon dropping the music video.

The pop star also launched the #TSAntiHeroChallenge, a soon-to-be viral social media trend that directs fans to share their antiheroic traits remixed with the lyrics “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me.”