Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department Is Her Most Explicit Album Yet

Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department is only a month away, and fans should prepare to cry and rage. On March 18, Swift’s 11th studio album became available to pre-save on Apple Music, revealing that it would be the singer’s most explicit record yet.

Seven of the album’s 16 tracks are marked as “explicit,” including the title track, “Down Bad,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” the Florence + the Machine collab “Florida!!!,” “loml,” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”

This count doesn’t include Swift’s four Tortured Poets bonus tracks — “The Manuscript,” “The Bolter,” “The Albatross,” and “The Black Dog” — which won’t be available to stream when the album comes out on April 19. Instead, those songs are spread out across four CD and vinyl variants that are only available on her website. Each has a unique cover, meaning their “explicit” status is unknown.

A History Of Cursing

In recent years, Swift has gradually used more curse words in her lyrics, starting with her 2017 album, Reputation, where she made fans gasp by saying “sh*t.” She dropped her first F-bomb on the 2020 surprise album Folklore, earning a “Parental Advisory” sticker.

Even one of her “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings for Red became explicit in 2021, with Swift proclaiming “f*ck the patriarchy!” on the 10-minute version of “All Too Well.”

The Tortured Poets Department continues this tradition, which is unsurprising given the literary themes and fans’ theories that it will be a Joe Alwyn breakup album. Swift’s last two albums, Evermore and Midnights, have six “explicit” tracks each, making this her most mature album yet in that regard. (The latter ties with Tortured Poets if you count the bonus track “Hits Different.”)

Additionally, The Tortured Poets Department is stylized in all caps and has been classified as a “pop” album on Apple Music, hinting at the album’s sound. That said, Swift’s Red (Taylor’s Version) is also labeled as “pop” on the platform despite containing many country and alternative-influenced songs, meaning that Tortured Poets could still go in many directions sonically.