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Hours after releasing her highly-anticipated album The Tortured Poets Department on Friday (April 19), Taylor Swift shocked fans by revealing the project was actually a "secret" double album that included over a dozen additional songs.
Swift made the surprise middle-of-the-night announcement on Instagram, unveiling The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology that features 15 new songs in addition to the 16 tracks on the original release because she wrote "so much tortured poetry" that she wanted to share.
"It's a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album," she wrote. "I'd written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here's the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn't mine anymore... it's all yours."
The Tortured Poets Department includes several songs hinting at the relationships of her past, as well as some suspected to be about her current love life. After the album dropped, Swift shared a message on Instagram to give fans a look into her process of creating the project, writing that it's "an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure."
Swift also noted that "this period of the author's life is now over" and that "the chapter is closed and boarded up" with "no scores to settle."
"There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed," she wrote. "And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted."
She concluded, "This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. And then all that's left behind is the tortured poetry."
The Tortured Poets Department and The Anthology are both out now. To celebrate, iHeartRadio, aka iHeartTaylor, played the album in its entirety with exclusive audio from Swift explaining the meanings to some of the tracks. Additionally, the Tortured Poets Radio will exclusively play the 16-track album along with some of the superstar's biggest hits throughout the years.