This Friday, Taylor Swift will be dropping her 10th studio album, Midnights. A number of fans looking forward to the release are convinced that Swift is going to take the opportunity of the album drop to make some big reveal, as always seems to be the case with Swifties. What’s more, they believe that she’s seeded Easter eggs for said reveal going back years. Because is it really a Taylor Swift album release if we’re not close-reading offhand comments she said to Jimmy Fallon three years ago?
There are two major fan theories at play in the lead-up to Midnights. The first we’re going to call the Karma theory. The second is the Gaylor theory. One of them has been nearly confirmed, and the other nearly dashed.
Break out your decoder rings. Find a comically oversized magnifying glass. We’re about to go sleuthing.
Is there a secret lost Taylor Swift album?
Swift recently announced that track 11 on Midnights would be titled “Karma.” This title fits neatly into the Karma theory, which runs as follows: There is a secret unreleased Taylor Swift album titled Karma that was supposed to come out in 2016. This hypothetical album, fans believe, was scrapped following the infamous #KimExposedTaylorParty, when Kim Kardashian released excerpts of tapes that appeared to catch Swift in a messy public lie, and the public rapidly turned on her. (The full tape, released four years later in 2020, would exonerate Swift.) The “Karma” song on Midnights, fans believe, will be an unreleased track from the secret scrapped Karma album, and likely a diss track aimed directly at Kanye West as his reputation continues to plummet.
Here’s the evidence for the Karma theory. For the first part of her career, Swift dropped a new album every two years precisely. If she were following established patterns, then her sixth album, the followup to 2014’s 1989, should have come out in 2016. But after her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West made her a public pariah, Swift skipped a year, releasing Reputation in 2017 instead. Was there, fans demand to know, another album that was supposed to come out in 2016 instead, preempted for Reputation after Swift’s fall from grace?