Midnights

Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, Midnights marked Swift's first new body of work since her 2020 indie folk albums, Folklore and Evermore. It is a moody concept album about nocturnal ruminations, written and produced by Swift with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Inspired by Swift's "sleepless nights", Midnights explores topics of anxiety, insecurity, self-criticism, self-awareness, insomnia, and self-confidence, using confessional yet cryptic lyrics. Sonically, it experiments with chill-out, electropop, dream pop, and bedroom pop styles, applying an alternative approach to the synth-pop sound of Swift's previous pop projects. The songs are characterized by subtle grooves, vintage synthesizers, drum machine, and hip hop/R&B rhythms. Swift unveiled the standard track list on a TikTok series called Midnights Mayhem with Me from September 21 to October 7, 2022. Receiving critical acclaim for its restrained production, candid songwriting and vocal cadences, publications ranked Midnights amongst the best albums of 2022. The album was commercially successful across all formats of music consumption and broke a string of records globally; journalists dubbed the ubiquitous success a testament to Swift's cultural impact. Midnights achieved the Spotify feat for the most single-day streams of an album and topped the charts in 28 territories. In the United States, it opened with over 1.57 million units, logged Swift's 11th number-one on the Billboard 200, the largest vinyl sales week of the 21st century, and became the best-selling album of 2022. The album spawned 10 top-ten songs on the Billboard Hot 100—the most for any album—in the same week. The lead single "Anti-Hero" scored Swift her ninth number-one song in the US and topped the charts in 14 other territories; "Lavender Haze" and "Karma" became the next singles, both peaking at number two on the Hot 100.