After a two-year hiatus from releasing a new album, pop star Taylor Swift released her newest album, “Midnights.” Each song symbolizes one of 13 sleepless nights scattered in her life and her journey through them.

After the release at 12 a.m, she dropped seven additional surprise tracks at 3 a.m, calling it “Midnights (3 am Edition.) These extra songs, not included in the original release, still symbolize sleepless nights she wrote about on her way to finding the perfect 13 original tracks.

Each song takes obvious inspiration from her previous albums, through their lyrics, background music and song titles. “Vigilante Shit” represents Swift’s past album “Reputation” with its bold lyrics and the aggressive tone of her voice. Each album she creates encapsulates the listener in a detailed realm with a specific aesthetic and vibe to each song. Numerous feel the setting of “Midnights” as a dream, including Swift living her way through multiple stories that fans can also understand.

“At first I didn’t really like how different this album felt compared to her other songs, but the more I listen to her music I’m getting used to it and it’s like a mixture of speak now and reputation. High infidelity is my favorite song because I like the beat and I think the lyrics are really catchy,” sophomore Addison Hill said.

Swift collaborated with various artists through the album, including Lana Del Ray, Sam Dew and Jahaan Sweet. Continuing their collaboration from “Folklore” and “Evermore”, Jack Antanoff and Aaron Dessner also collaborate with Swift as her main co-writers for “Midnights.” Swift decided to collaborate with Antanoff and Dessner after the messy separation from her previous production company, Big Machine, in 2018. 

She released videos on social platforms TikTok and Instagram showing sneak peeks of the track names throughout the weeks leading up to the release date. Swift commonly leaves hidden messages through each choice in her career, causing fans to create theories upon each step of a new track. For example, numerous believe they can guess the next “Taylor’s Version” album because of hidden clues in the new “Antihero” music video.

“The suspense of the clues to the album was distracting the waiting for the album to come out. When you anticipate the release days of the tracks you become more stressed out about it. Claiming the songs was the most fun part of leading up to the release,” sophomore Olivia Doucette said.

Swift broke records on the day of the release, including the most streamed album in a single day and most streamed artists in a single day in Spotify history. Swift plans other events through the week of the release including music videos, exclusive vinyl editions and appearances on Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” and “The Graham Norton Show.”

“I feel like there is a little bit of each album in this one album and I love how there are certain songs that I’m like oh my gosh this reminds me of her other album, ‘Fearless’. You can like hear it too in the way she sings it like the special ones in the CD scream ‘Red’,” Doucette said.