Finally, Taylor Swift fans have some new material that they’ve been waiting for: a new song and accompanying music video.
Entitled “ME!,” Swift’s highly anticipated tune takes listeners back to the “Love Story”-era country pop roots that brought the Nashville star to fame. The music video begins with Swift fighting with Panic! At the Disco’s lead singer, Brendon Urie, who the song features, before she sings resolutely, “I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”
With catchy hooks and a singalong vibe, “ME!” is a decidedly dramatic departure from her 2017 album Reputation, which saw the singer-songwriter embrace hip-hop and R&B influences in songs like “…Ready For It?” and “Look What You Made Me Do.”
The music release follows months of the superstar’s sharing of cryptic Instagram posts and featuring on magazine covers. She performed for her fellow honorees at the TIME 100 Gala — there to celebrate making the list the 2019 TIME 100 most influential people — and showed up for an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts. It all led up to the Apr. 26 drop of the track, which she teased with a careful countdown on her website to midnight on Friday morning. On the evening of the release, she appeared out and about back in Nashville, TN, posing in front of a large street mural of a butterfly emblazoned with the title “ME!” and taking photos with fans.
It’s the first new music that Swift has put out since Reputation and will spark the beginning of what fans expect to be her seventh album cycle. In the past, Swift has stuck to a fall album-release schedule, putting out an album fairly regularly in the autumn every other year. But she seems to be switching up her strategy in 2019 with “ME!” Meanwhile, music hasn’t been her only priority over the past year; she also filmed the live-action movie adaptation of the play Cats.
See her latest video above.
