The record marks Swift’s 12th album and is already poised to be one of the best-selling albums of the year.
Global superstar Taylor Swift returned with her twelfth album, Life of a Model, released on Friday, after a nearly two-month wait since she first announced it on the New Heights podcast with Travis and Jason Kelce last August.
The album features only one collaboration with pop star Sabrina Carpenter and is her first new album since last year’s Tortured Poets. The music video for the album’s lead single, “Ophelia’s Fate,” is scheduled to be released on Sunday, October 5, at 7 p.m. EST. The music video was directed and written by Taylor Swift.
The album comes after a period of significant changes in Swift’s life. In May, she purchased the rights to her first six albums, ending a long-running dispute with her former manager, Scooter Braun. Braun had purchased the catalog with her former label, Big Machine Records, in 2019, then sold it to Shamrock Capital the following year, which Swift later acquired for an undisclosed sum.
In August, just weeks after the album’s announcement, Kelce and Swift revealed their engagement, two years after they began dating.
The album was recorded during her European Eras Tour, where she re-teamed with legendary producers Max Martin and Shellback, who worked with her on her biggest pop hits like “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” and “22.” This collaboration marks Swift’s return to a more commercial pop style and is the first album in years where she hasn’t collaborated with Jack Antonov.
“We’ve never made an album where it’s just the three of us, with no other collaborators,” Swift said on the New Heights podcast. “It felt like we caught lightning in a bottle. I told him, ‘I want to be as proud of this album as I am of Eras.'”
Kelsi explained that the album is “more upbeat, more energetic, and more pop-oriented than her recent albums.”
In addition to the album, Swift will be hosting a special screening in theaters throughout the weekend, including the world premiere of the music video for “Ophelia’s Fate” and behind-the-scenes footage.
Her previous album, The Tortured Poets’ Oath, was the best-selling album of 2024, selling two million copies in its first week, and The Model’s Life is expected to achieve similar numbers. Target stores across the country will also open at midnight to sell copies of the album, heightening the excitement for the album’s first numbers.
