Taylor Swift has made a rare media appearance on New Heights, the podcast hosted by NFL players Travis and Jason Kelce. At 12:12 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, April 12, she announced her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, in a clip from the episode. During its premiere tonight (Wednesday, August 13), she revealed the album’s cover art, release date, and tracklist, which includes a guest appearance from Sabrina Carpenter on the title track. Check those out and watch the episode below.
“And, baby, that’s show business for you. New album The Life of a Showgirl. Out October 3,” Swift wrote on social media. Recorded during the Eras Tour, her 12th studio album will follow last year’s The Tortured Poets Department and its extended edition, The Anthology. Swift produced the record alongside Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish songwriting team behind some of her biggest hits including “22,” “Blank Space,” and “I Knew You Were Trouble.” “The three of us have made some of my favorite songs that I’ve ever done before,” she told the Kelce brothers.
“When I was on tour in Stockholm, I had Max Martin come out to the show,” Swift added, “and I was talking to him, and I was just like, ‘I feel like we could knock it out of the park if we went back in.’” She confirmed that The Life of a Showgirl features no producers other than Martin and Shellback, meaning that Jack Antonoff—who played a prominent role on every Swift album from 2019’s Lover through The Tortured Poets Department—and the National’s Aaron Dessner are not involved.
“This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant,” Swift said on the podcast. “It just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life. And so that effervescence has come through on this record.”
She continued: “With Tortured Poets Department, I was like, ‘Here’s a data dump of everything I thought and felt in two or three years. Here’s 31 songs.’ This is 12. There’s not a 13th, there’s no other ones coming. This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time…Every single song is on this album for hundreds of reasons, you know, and you couldn’t take one out, and it’d be the same album. You couldn’t add one. It’s just right.”
Asked by Jason Kelce to explain the album’s “theme,” Swift replied: “It’s everything that was going on behind the curtain.” She described her goals in making the record as “melodies that were so infectious that you’re almost angry at it, and lyrics that are just as vivid but crisp and focused and completely intentional.”
On New Heights, Swift also discussed her courtship with Travis Kelce, her original vision for the Eras Tour, and buying back the master recordings for her first six albums. Four of those records—Fearless, Speak Now, Red, and 1989—had been given the “Taylor’s Version” treatment since 2021. Swift was nominated in six categories at the 2025 Grammy Awards, but didn’t take home any trophies.
Read about Taylor Swift on “The 200 Most Important Artists of Pitchfork’s First 25 Years.”
The Life of a Showgirl:
01 The Fate of Ophelia
02 Elizabeth Taylor
03 Opalite
04 Father Figure
05 Eldest Daughter
06 Ruin the Friendship
07 Actually Romantic
08 Wi$h Li$t
09 Wood
10 Cancelled!
11 Honey
12 The Life of a Showgirl [ft. Sabrina Carpenter]
