Taylor Swift has released the music video for “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone from her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. The track is the first single from the record, which the singer released early Friday.
In the footage, Swift and Post Malone play ex-lovers, with the latter trying to save the singer who appears trapped in her own space. At one point, Swift also seemingly has matching face tattoos as Post Malone. By the end of the video, Swift is breaking free, burning poems and breaking windows.
“When I was writing the Fortnight music video, I wanted to show you the worlds I saw in my head that served as the backdrop for making this music,” the singer wrote on Instagram amid the music video’s release. “Pretty much everything in it is a metaphor or a reference to one corner of the album or another. For me, this video turned out to be the perfect visual representation of this record and the stories I tell in it. @postmalone blew me away on set as our tortured tragic hero and I’m so grateful to him for everything he put into this collaboration.”
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Elsewhere in the footage, Dead Poets Society stars Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles also make cameos as what appear to be scientists with Swift as their test subject.
“I’m still laughing from getting to work with the coolest guys on earth, @ethanhawke and @mrjoshcharles (tortured poets, meet your colleagues from down the hall, the dead poets),” Swift added in her post.
Ahead of the release of the “Fortnight” music video, Swift shared on Instagram, “I’ve been such a huge fan of Post because of the writer he is, his musical experimentation and those melodies he creates that just stick in your head forever. I got to witness that magic come to life firsthand when we worked together.”
The Tortured Poets Department dropped on Friday. The album, the eleventh of Swift’s career, features 16 songs. Two hours after the initial release, Swift released a “double album” expansion of the record, titled The Anthology, that featured 15 more songs.
“It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album,” Swift wrote on Instagram. “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.”
Less than 24 hours after its release, Tortured Poets broke multiple records on Spotify, becoming the audio giant’s most-streamed album in a single day. Swift also became the most-streamed artist in a single day in Spotify history.
On Tuesday, Swift teased the “Fortnight” music video with a clip of “The TTPD Timetable” featuring an audience POV tour of a schoolhouse setting, with a calendar noting the video’s drop on April 19. On Thursday, she wrote beneath a second tease, “At this hearing, I stand before my fellow members of The Tortured Poets Department with a summary of my findings.”
At the time of the initial album’s release, Swift referred to the record as “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.”
“This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up,” she continued. “There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. 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.”
Spotify also revealed on Thursday that the album became the most pre-saved album Countdown Page in the history of the audio streamer.
The singer-songwriter first announced the album’s release in February at the Grammy Awards, where she took home trophies for best pop vocal album and best album for her 2022 release, Midnights.
“This is my 13th Grammy,” Swift said when accepting the pop vocal album award, acknowledging her proclaimed lucky number. “I want to say thank you to the members of the Recording Academy for voting this way, but I know that the way that the Recording Academy voted is a direct reflection of the passion of the fans. So I want to say ‘thank you’ to the fans by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years — which is that my brand new album comes out April 19.”
