No surprise here: “Patient Zero,” the song Taylor Swift announced Tuesday, is not an orphan or a one-off. The pop superstar followed news of the single a day later with her Wednesday morning reveal for a release that includes four new tracks and will also be out this Friday — “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore.”
A visit to pre-order pages shows that the new songs, besides the already announced “Patient Zero,” are “Cleveland!,” “Pink Clouding” and “Babylon,” listed as tracks 13-16 on the newly expanded version of her 2025 “Showgirl” album.
On social media, Swift wrote, “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. I took a trip to Sweden to celebrate with Max and Shellback, my two collaborators on this album. Really 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. I hope you love them, because they were born out of pure gratitude for your exuberance for and celebration of the album we made. ‘The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore’ including four new songs is out on Friday and available to pre-order and save now.”
Swifties had long assumed there would be no deluxe or bonus-filled edition of 2025’s “The Life of a Showgirl” because, at the time, Swift had assured fans that she felt pleased with the exact 12-song configuration she was putting out and did want to augment it with anything she might have left on the cutting room floor. But, as fans now learn, that didn’t preclude coming up with additional material after the fact, which the singer is saying came out in a spontaneous explosion of post-release exhilaration with her two collaborators on that album.
Prior to “Showgirl,” she hadn’t worked with the dynamic duo of Max Martin and Shellback since 2018’s “Reputation,” but clearly the reunion took in a big way.
Eagle-eyed Swifties noted that Swift had quietly teased this project some time ago, by including the phrase “Patient for the encore” to the side of the frame in her music video for the “Showgirl” single “Opalite.”
Much more recently, she had given fans Easter eggs in puzzle form with a pre-taped sketch that aired as part of the Emmys telecast. There; Swift, in character as a “Law & Order: SVU” detective, said, “I think what we’re going to be looking for is hiding in plain sight.” She then stared into the camera and uttered several seeming nonsense phrases or words: “Saccharide. Aries. From the vineyard. North or south.” Fans eventually figured out that if you took the third letter from each of those utterances, they gave up the letters that form the word “encore.”
The announcement of the “Encore” edition also settles another point of trivia that had come up when Swift revealed the “Patient Zero” single was imminent on Tuesday. Many pointed out that Swift was not lately in the habit of releasing a stand-alone single ahead of an album actually coming out; the last time she had done so was with “Me!” being released months ahead of “Lover” in 2019. Now that everyone knows the “Encore” collection is coming out the same hour as the single, it’s clear she’s not breaking with that recent pattern after all.
The new release features cover photography by the team of fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, continuing the imagery they created ffor the original “Showgirl” album.
No physical release has been announced for the expanded project, which hits DSPs as Thursday night turns into Friday morning. The streaming service Apple Music does show the track list as being broken down into Disc 1 (the original 12 tracks) and Disc 2 (the four newly released songs), but it’s unclear if that augurs for a two-disc vinyl or CD edition. Spotify has the 16 tracks listed in a single running order.
For now, the release of the four “Showgirl” addenda puts to bed previous widespread conjecture that Swift was certain to put out “Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version)” this fall to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her debut album. But setting that aside for newly written songs is a tradeoff most fans will be happy with. So, “Our Song (Middle Aged Version)” can wait.
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