Taylor Swift fans are known for their attention to detail and crazed scrutiny of the trail of clues the singer leaves regarding her new music — and now she's speaking to them directly and offering a bit of help.
In a cheeky TikTok posted at midnight on Sept. 21, Swift not only addressed her pattern of leaving breadcrumbs for her fans to decipher, but she also announced the title of the 13th track on her upcoming album, "Midnights," which is called "Mastermind."
"I know that I have a habit of dropping cryptic clues and Easter eggs when giving you information about new music, and I’m not here to deny that, but I am here to defy that,” she says. "Welcome to a new series I’m calling 'Midnights Mayhem With Me.' I am going to be using this technologically advanced device to help me allow fate to decide exactly what track titles I’m going to be announcing and in what order."
Swift, dressed in a yellow blazer, sits on a velvet chair in front of a crushed-velvet backdrop in the TikTok. Next to her is a gold lottery-ball cage, and she says each lottery ball inside has a number that represents a song on the 13-track album.
She draws a number from the cage and says it's "track 13, because of course" with a smirk. The singer then picks up a red phone and announces, "Track 13 is called 'Mastermind.'"
Fans were quick to start questioning everything in the video.
"Ok but why the vintage toy phone," one TikToker commented.
"BLONDIE WE GOTTA DO THIS FOR THE NEXT 12 NIGHTS??" another fan wrote in the comments, questioning how often the singer plans to reveal the song titles.
Even the official Ritz Crackers account chimed in with, "SUDDENLY I LOVE MAYHEM ??????"
Swift captioned the TikTok with "Midnights tracklist reveal!! Introducing: Midnights Mayhem with Me," but it will remain to be seen how much longer she continues the series, and which other track titles will be revealed.
Swift first told fans of her upcoming 10th studio album while accepting a MTV Video Music Award for video of the year on Aug. 28. "I had made up my mind that if you were going to be this generous and give us this, I thought it might be a fun moment to tell you that my brand new album comes out on Oct. 21," Swift said during her speech. "And I will tell you more at midnight."
And as promised, Swift released the album cover and details about the tracks (13 in total, obviously) at the stroke of midnight. She said in an Instagram post the album will tell the story of "13 sleepless nights" throughout her life.
"We lie awake in love and in fear, in turmoil and in tears. We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren’t — right this minute — about to make some fateful life-altering mistake," she said.
She continued to describe the songs on the album as a "collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face."
"Midnights" will be Swift's first new album after she surprise dropped "folklore" and "evermore" in 2020. Last year, she released the rerecorded "Red (Taylor's Version)," which included a 10-minute version of her hit, "All Too Well." Earlier this year, she released "Carolina," a track for the 2022 film "Where the Crawdads Sing."
Swift has yet to release a single for the upcoming album, and it's unclear if "Mastermind" will be a single at all — just one more thing for Swifties to try to predict over the next few weeks.
