Taylor Swift has broken yet another record with her latest album The Tortured Poets Department.
Since the album was released a week ago, it has topped the UK’s music chart with the biggest first-week sales in seven years.
The BBC reports that the 31-track double album (including a second volume titled The Anthology, which Swift presented as a surprise to her fans) shifted 270,000 UK chart units in seven days, beating Swift’s previous best of 204,000 for her 2022 album Midnights.
Swift now matches Madonna as the female artist with the most ever UK number one albums. Both have 12 to their name, as does Bruce Springsteen. Only The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Robbie Williams and Elvis Presley have more.
Swift has broken other records with this album. By the end of launch day, it had become Spotify’s most streamed album ever in a single day, and five days later had been streamed a billion times, the first album ever to do so.
The album is a clear verbal souvenir of the last couple of years of Swift’s romantic life, including a long relationship with English actor Joe Alwyn, and a shorter fling with 1975 frontman Matt Healey, who appears to come off worst in the lyrics, with the title of one song, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, being attributed by many to the diminutive pop star.
