Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ Will Release on Oct. 3

Music|Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ Will Release on Oct. 3

Taylor Swift said on Wednesday that her newest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” would be released on Oct. 3, sharing the details with her legion of fans in a rare podcast appearance. Swift spoke about the album, reclaiming her masters and her blockbuster Eras Tour on “New Heights,” which is co-hosted by Travis Kelce, her boyfriend and a three-time Super Bowl champion.

“The Life of a Showgirl” is her 12th studio album and her first since “The Tortured Poets Department,” released in April 2024. The album’s producers are Max Martin, Shellback and Swift, according to her social media posts. Twelve songs are listed on the back of a vinyl cover on her website, including the title track, which features Sabrina Carpenter.

Swift said she made the album during the Eras Tour, thus the name. Why an orange palette? “It feels like kind of energetically how my life has felt,” she said on the podcast episode. “And this album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour.”

The 21-month tour, which celebrated the many phases of Swift’s career and ended in December, generated $2 billion in ticket sales over nearly 150 shows across five continents.

As Swift has risen to the pinnacle of popular culture, she has opted to communicate directly with her fans through posts on social media rather than sit for traditional interviews. (In 2023, she spoke with Time magazine when it named her person of the year.) The 124-minute podcast episode is enabling Swift’s fans to hear straight from her in what was something of a full-circle moment.

It was on a 2023 episode of “New Heights” that Kelce told his listeners that he had been thwarted in an attempt to slip Swift his number at one of her concerts.

Soon after, though, Swift and Kelce began dating, which the world learned when she began making public appearances at the tight end’s football games. Swift attended the Kansas City Chiefs’ overtime Super Bowl victory in 2024 and their Super Bowl loss this year, while Kelce made a brief appearance as a backup dancer in one of Swift’s concerts.

Swift has rarely been on podcasts, although in 2020 she spoke about the songwriting process for her album “Evermore” on “The Zane Lowe Interview Series.” “New Heights,” hosted by Kelce and his brother, the retired N.F.L. center Jason Kelce, was the top-ranked podcast on Apple on Wednesday morning as people scrambled to download it ahead of her appearance.