Fans Choose Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ as This Week’s Favorite New Music
Written by Mitchell Peters on April 21, 2024
Taylor Swift‘s The Tortured Poets Department has topped this week’s new music poll.
Music fans voted in a poll published Friday (April 19) on Billboard, choosing the pop superstar’s new double album as their favorite new music release of the past week.
The Tortured Poets Department brought in nearly 75% of the vote, beating out new music by DJ Snake featuring Peso Pluma (“Teka”); Nicki Minaj featuring Travis Scott, Chris Brown and Sexyy Red (“FTCU (Remix)”); Pearl Jam (Dark Matter); and Cloud Nothings (Final Summer).
The Tortured Poets Department is Swift’s eleventh studio album and her her first release of new music since 2022’s Grammy-winning Midnights. The 31-track double album features collaborations with Florence + the Machine and Post Malone, as well as writing and production contributions from Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.
On Instagram, Swift described the project as “an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”
Although The Tortured Poets Department is Swift’s first album of new music since Midnights, she has steadily pumped out her re-recorded Taylor’s Version albums in the interim. In between the two aforementioned albums, Swift topped the Billboard 200 with both Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version), the latter of which became the star’s record-extending sixth album to debut with over one million pure sales in its first week.
The Tortured Poets Department is already off to a stellar start in the U.S. Upon its first day of release on Friday (April 19), the set sold 1.4 million copies in traditional album sales, according to initial reports to data tracking firm Luminate. That marks Swift’s biggest sales week ever for any album in the U.S.
The Tortured Poets Department had also broken numerous Spotify records at press time, including becoming the first album in the streaming service’s history to have more than 300 million streams in a single day. The set’s first single, “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone, also became Spotify’s most streamed song in a single day.
Trailing behind The Tortured Poets Department on the poll is DJ Snake and Peso Pluma’s dance floor hit “Teka,” which dropped just in time for Peso’s performance at Coachella weekend two. The team-up brought in 10% of the vote.
See the final results of this week’s new music release poll below.
