Patient For The Encore
Taylor Swift Announces The Life Of A Showgirl: The Encore
The singer changed her mind and is giving fans a deluxe edition of her 2025 album.
Like any good showgirl, Taylor Swift is coming back out for an encore. On Sept. 23, the singer announced a surprise deluxe edition of her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, fittingly titled The Encore. The reissued album will feature four new tracks, including her previously announced new single “Patient Zero,” all of which will come out on Sept. 25.
The reveal may come as a shock to some fans, as when Swift unveiled Showgirl in August 2025, she emphasized that there would be no bonus tracks beyond the 12-song album. However, taking to social media, the singer explained that she traveled to Sweden to celebrate the album’s record-breaking success with her collaborators Max Martin and Shellback, and her mind quickly changed.
“About a year ago, you guys did a truly unfathomable thing. Something that completely blew my mind... You gave The Life of a Showgirl the biggest first week for an album in history,” she wrote. “We just wanted to reflect and take in how grateful we were for the moment we were in, but there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: We wrote more songs.”
The Encore is available to pre-save on streaming platforms, which show that Swift’s other three new songs are named “Cleveland!,” “Pink Clouding,” and “Babylon.”
“I hope you love them, because they were born out of pure gratitude for your exuberance for and celebration of the album we made,” she wrote.
In true Swiftian fashion, there were some Easter eggs that led to The Encore — what else did you expect? In fact, the clues date back to February, when Swift’s “Opalite” video had a movie poster hidden in the background that read “Patient for the Encore,” which fans thought was a rather specific message.
More recently, Swift made a surprise appearance in a Law & Order: SVU-themed sketch on the 2026 Emmys, where she planted cryptic Easter eggs: “Saccharide. Ares. From the vineyard. North or south.” A week later, she changed her Instagram bio to “And, baby, that’s sh0w business f0r y0u,” switching three letter Os to zeroes, which was a clear hint at “Patient Zero.” However, when fans took the third letter of her mysterious Emmys phrases, it spelled “Encore.” Yes, really.
