Taylor Swift: What's going on with her new album? All the clues so far

Taylor Swift’s seventh album is coming. Probably. It’s not explicitly been announced, but on April 13 everything from the singer's Twitter account to her website was suddenly taken over by an image of pastel-pink and blue clouds, and her social bios all changed to "4.26". Adverts counting down to April 26 have popped up in capital cities around the world, and her website has also transformed into a countdown. Unless she is really inappropriately excited for Avengers: Endgame, which also comes out on April 26, it’s almost certain that we’re going to get new music from her in less than two weeks time.

This ties with everything we know about Swift, too. Her albums have all been released with two-year breaks (except for Reputation, but more on that later) and her last came out in the autumn of 2017. She also has previous form for playing with social media to announce new music: for Reputation she wiped her social media accounts clean, left them blank for three days, then posted a ten second clip of a snake and, two days after that, when Swifties across the world were going wild, finally announced her new album. In comparison, a global countdown and suddenly turning everything pink is nothing.

That being said, it’s unlikely we’re going to get the full album in April. All of Swift’s previous albums have been released in October or November, and we’ll probably see the same happen with "TS7" (as fans are calling it). Her followers are instead speculating that we will see a slow release of singles and/or music videos throughout the year before a big album release in autumn – and that Swift actually teased this in her official calendar for 2019.

In said calendar there are wax stamps on the 13th day of April, May, July, August and December. Thirteen has been Swift's lucky number for years and the first announcement, counting down to April 26, was on the April 13. Perhaps there is going to be an announcement or a single release on those months, leading up to an album towards the end of the year.

Either way, if this is a new release it will be the first since Swift's move to Republic Records and Universal Music Group, having last year left Big Machine Label Group, the label she had been with since the start of her career. So the question is, what kind of album is it going to be?

There have long been rumours that Swift was working on an album but scrapped it in order to respond to the things being said about her in the press with Reputation. She would have been working on this album during her relationship with DJ Calvin Harris, whom she also wrote lyrics for, so there’s a chance it would have been influenced by her then-boyfriend’s musical style. If Swift is using some of that material on this album, then that could hint to a more synthetic, dance-pop style than we’ve had from her before – which also ties in with the new synthetic, colourful aesthetic on her social channels.

Another theory is that Swift is using her social channels to indicate that the next album will be Los Angeles-themed. Many of the photos she’s been posting since February 11 have been taken in LA, and there are also two websites (julythirteen.com and apriltwentysix.com) which include a reference to the City of Angels in their code and have coordinates to the city's Beverly Hills Hotel. There’s no confirmation as to whether or not these websites are official Taylor Swift websites or just someone teasing excited fans, but you can read more about the theories on Twitter.

Something fans are fairly certain of, though, is that this album is going to be about rebirth. Back in March, fans noticed that Swift was posting more frequently about butterflies — everything from mentioning the Southern California butterfly migration to wearing butterfly wings on her shoes. She’s even started putting butterflies on her gifts to friends.

The theme of Reputation was snakes, which she adopted after people called her a snake on social media to insult her. Fans wonder if the theme of TS7 is going to be butterflies, to suggest that the singer has gone through a kind of metamorphosis. Whether this is an emotional or musical metamorphosis is still up for debate, but Swift has shown in the past that she’s more than willing to go through either. It could hint to an album of brighter, more relaxed music than we heard on Reputation, or it could be pointing to an album that’s more emotionally stable and at peace with itself than we’ve heard before.

This second idea links with something Taylor said in a recent interview with Elle magazine, about needing to forgive herself: ”I’ve come to a realization that I need to be able to forgive myself for making the wrong choice, trusting the wrong person, or figuratively falling on my face in front of everyone. Step into the daylight and let it go”.

Truthfully, until April 26 we can't be sure what she’s planning and what kind of new music we can expect from her. Not that that will stop the fans speculating, of course.