Taylor Swift's new album 'The Life of a Showgirl' is coming this fall — here's everything we know

• Taylor Swift's 12th studio album, "The Life of a Showgirl," will be released on October 3.
• The tracklist includes 12 songs and a duet with Sabrina Carpenter.
• Swift reunited with Max Martin and Shellback to co-produce the album.

Taylor Swift fans rejoice: The chart-topping pop star, who's been largely avoiding the spotlight since concluding the Eras Tour last December, has officially set another new era in motion.

Swift announced Tuesday that her 12th studio album is titled "The Life of a Showgirl." She made the big reveal in a teaser for her appearance on "New Heights," the podcast hosted by her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, and his brother, Jason Kelce.

When the full episode premiered on Wednesday, Swift simultaneously revealed the album cover, tracklist, and release date — October 3 — on social media.

During the episode itself, Swift also shared more details about the album's aesthetic, explaining how the cover art was inspired by her behind-the-scenes experience of the Eras Tour.

"My day ends with me in a bathtub, not usually in a bedazzled dress," she told the Kelce brothers. "I wanted to glamorize all the different aspects of how the tour felt."

"The reason I wanted to have an offstage moment as the main album cover is because the album isn't really about what happened to me onstage, but what I was going through offstage."

The singer's most attentive followers, aka "Swifties," are constantly keeping an eye out for Easter eggs and hints of new music — but speculation ramped up earlier this week when Taylor Nation, the social media arm of Swift's PR team, shared a collection of 12 photos from the Eras Tour, all of Swift wearing different shades of orange.

The caption said, "Thinking about when she said 'See you next era…'" with a burning-heart emoji.

Even casual observers of Swift may recognize her custom of color-coding album cycles. Each color usually corresponds with the album's artwork and, in some cases, its lyrics and themes.

Such was the case for 2012's "Red," named for the color Swift associates with passionate, reckless love affairs, and 2017's "Reputation," an album whose black-and-white aesthetic was partially intended to evoke newsprint. Orange had yet to be associated with any other album in Swift's catalog.

Later that day, Swift's official website was updated with a countdown to 12:12 a.m. on Tuesday, August 12, set against a sparkly orange backdrop. (The numeric repetition is another of Swift's calling cards.)

"The Life of a Showgirl" will be Swift's first new album since announcing that she bought back her masters, giving her complete ownership of her musical catalog and effectively rendering her "Taylor's Version" project moot. Before the purchase was made public in May, Swifties had been eagerly anticipating the rerecorded version of "Reputation," her fan-favorite sixth album — though Swift has since confessed she has no imminent plans to release it.

"To be perfectly honest, it's the one album in those first 6 that I thought couldn't be improved upon by redoing it," Swift wrote in an open letter to fans. She added that she did finish rerecording her self-titled debut album — the only other missing entry in the "Taylor's Version" series — though she didn't clarify when it might come to light.

"Those two albums can still have their moments to reemerge when the time is right, if that would be something you guys would be excited about," she wrote. "But if it happens, it won't be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now."

Instead, Swifties will soon get a batch of fresh tracks from the prolific songwriter. "The Life of a Showgirl" is the follow-up to 2024's "The Tortured Poets Department," a colossal double album that topped the Billboard 200 chart for 17 weeks — the longest reign of Swift's career thus far — and spawned the No. 1 hit single "Fortnight."

The tracklist includes 12 songs and a duet with Sabrina Carpenter

In the final photo that Taylor Nation shared on Monday, Swift is singing onstage with Sabrina Carpenter, her fan-turned-protégé and Eras Tour opener.

Swifties took her inclusion as a clue that Carpenter is featured on "The Life of a Showgirl" — a theory that was proven correct when Swift shared the official tracklist. The album's closer and titular track is a duet with Carpenter.

Other song titles include "The Fate of Ophelia," possibly a reference to the tragic heroine in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," and "Elizabeth Taylor," named after the famous '50s movie star.

Among many other literary references, Swift has included nods to both Shakespeare and Elizabeth Taylor in past songs; one of her most famous hits, 2008's "Love Story," is an optimistic twist on "Romeo + Juliet." Meanwhile, Elizabeth Taylor is name-dropped in the 2017 single "…Ready For It?"

Also notable: Track 10 on "The Life of a Showgirl" is titled "Cancelled!" and stylized in all caps. Swift ruminated on the psychological effects of "cancel culture" throughout "Reputation," as well as the standout track "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" from "The Tortured Poets Department."

Swift reunited with Max Martin and Shellback to co-produce 'The Life of a Showgirl'

Though he is famously private and media-averse, Max Martin is known as one of the music industry's most iconic hitmakers, dating back to '90s hits like "I Want You Back" by *NSYNC, "I Want It That Way" by the Backstreet Boys, and "...Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears.

Martin began working with Shellback, a fellow Swede, in the mid-aughts. Together, they co-produced the biggest hits from Swift's fan-favorite album "Red" ("22," "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," and "I Knew You Were Trouble") and much of her subsequent pair of pop blockbusters, "1989" and "Reputation."

During the episode of "New Heights," Swift described Martin as her "mentor" and said he and Shellback helped make some of her favorite songs in her discography, including "Shake It Off," "Blank Space," "Style," and "Delicate."

"We've never actually made an album before where it's just the three of us. There's no other collaborators. It's just the three of us making a focused album," she explained. "It felt like catching lightning in a bottle."

As one might suspect from the duo's participation, Swift confirmed that she considers "The Life of a Showgirl" to be full of "bangers" and "melodies that were so infectious that you're almost angry at it."

"I essentially said to him, I want to be as proud of an album as I am of the Eras Tour, and for the same reasons," Swift said of Martin. She even said she would fly to Sweden in between shows to work on music with him.

"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. It just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life," she continued. "And so that effervescence has come through on this record."

Swift has already shut down theories of a double album

For her previous two albums, Swift surprise-released another set of songs just a few hours after they each dropped, dubbed "Midnights (3am Edition)" and "The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology," respectively.

In the latter's case, this nearly doubled the length of "The Tortured Poets Department," making it her bulkiest album to date with 31 songs — a decision that drew plenty of criticism.

Fans had already begun speculating that Swift was planning a similar surprise for "The Life of a Showgirl," but she has denied that's the case.

"With 'Tortured Poets Department,' I was like, 'Here's a data dump of everything I thought, felt, and experienced in two or three years. Here's 31 songs.' This is 12. There's not a 13th, there's not other ones coming," Swift said on "New Heights."

"This is the record I've been wanting to make for a very long time," she added. "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."