Taylor Swift is officially entering her next era, with the superstar announcing her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, during a teaser for an upcoming special episode of Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights podcast on Wednesday.
The new album — her 12th studio effort since her 2006 debut — marks Swift’s first new project since releasing The Tortured Poets Department in April 2024. Just over a year later, that album is already six-times-platinum, according to the RIAA, and it was nominated for album of the year at the 67th Grammy Awards.
Earlier on Monday, a countdown started on Swift’s official website, with it expiring at 12:12 p.m. ET. At that time, a new teaser for the upcoming New Heights episode — which will feature the pop superstar as a guest — dropped on her Instagram.
New Heights teased Swift’s special appearance on the podcast earlier Monday, confirming a special guest online and posting an anonymous silhouette. The podcast later confirmed on Instagram that Swift was in fact the special guest.
Swift has kept a low profile in 2025 compared to the past several years since she wrapped her record-breaking Eras Tour at the end of 2024. Though she made waves back in May when she announced that she’d finally secured the purchase of the rights to her early master recordings. That ended one of the most contentious disputes in music business history, which had begun when music executive Scooter Braun bought the rights to Swift’s first five albums via an acquisition of her former record label Big Machine in 2019. (Braun sold her masters to Shamrock Capital a year later, with Swift making a deal with the company this year.)
“This was a business deal to them, but I really felt like they saw it for what was to me: my memories and my sweat and my handwriting and my decades of dreams,” Swift said of the deal at the time.
Still, even as that controversy courted drama, Swift turned it into a lucrative chapter in her career with the “Taylor’s Versions” of her original albums, which helped elevate her superstardom and, in several cases, outsold the originals.
Like all of Swift’s releases, the new album will almost assuredly be a chart monster as well, as she is perhaps the only artist left in the business who could reliably sell a million units in one week alone. (2022’s Midnights debuted with over 1.5 million units sold in its first week, while last year’s The Tortured Poets Department opened with a massive 2.6 million units.)