Taylor Swift cusses up a storm in new album, 'Florida!!!' has 2nd-most f-bombs

Pop music global megastar Taylor Swift is setting records right and left with her latest album, "The Tortured Poets Department."

One billion Spotify streams in five days. Grabbing the top 14 spots on the Billboard's Hot 100 chart, with every single one of the 31 songs from the album making the top 100. Tying Jay-Z for most No. 1s by a solo artist in nearly 70 years of counting. Most vinyl copies sold. The top-selling album of 2024, with 1.914 million sold, according to Billboard.

It's also her album with, by far, the most swearing.

With this collection of intimate and emotional songs presumed largely to be about her breakup with former boyfriend Joe Alwyn, Swift is expressing her deepest feelings. And some f-bombs. A lot of f-bombs.

Swift is no longer the squeaky-clean 16-year-old country star who later skipped her junior prom to accept the Breakthrough Video Award at the CMT Music Awards in 2007 and the evolution of her music shows that.

The entertainment site The List analyzed over 19 years of the 34-year-old singer-songwriter's discography and found that profanity in "The Tortured Poets Department" is up 5,600% from her debut album. Fans have definitely noticed. The New York Post reported that moms of "Taylor Tots" are concerned over the increase of profanity in her work.

'I Hate It Here' lyrics: Taylor Swift draws backlash for 'all the racists' lyrics on new 'Tortured Poets' album

Which Taylor Swift songs have the most swearing?

"Down Bad" easily holds the record so far, with 18 f-bombs, which The List categorizes as "4% explicitness."

After that is "Florida!!!" with 12 swear words and "Lavender Haze" with 10.

Altogether "The Tortured Poets Department" includes 57 swear words compared to 2022's "Midnights" (31), and 2020's "evermore" (19) "folklore" (10), according to The List's analysis and Pfcom's official profanity guide.

Previous records were markedly cleaner. Her eponymous debut album had one simple "damn," and the next two had none at all. "Red" in 2012 had one, 2014's "1989" and 2017's "Reputation" had three each, and "Lover in 2019 had four.

What are Taylor Swift's favorite swear words?

The List pored over all 65,019 words Swift has written and found the 10 she uses the most in her lyrics. Some, like hell, damn, and bitch are FCC-compliant, others are more explicit.

• F--- (42 times)

• S--- (25 times)

• Hell (20 times)

• Damn (19 times, also includes uses of "damned")

• Goddamn (9 times)

• Bitch (8 times)

• Whore (2 times)

• Pissed (2 times)

• Ass (1 time)

• D---head (1 time)

Swift sees backlash over 'all the racists' lyric

Even more so than the cusses, Swift's reference to "all the racists" in her song "I Hate It Here" drew criticism from critics and some fans.

In the song, she sings about how history is distorted by nostalgia. It's the first time Swift has mentioned race in her music.

"My friends used to play a game where we would pick a decade, we wished we could live in instead of this / I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off for the highest bid," Swift sings.

Some fans criticized the song on X, formerly known as Twitter. "y’all .. there are so many wrong things about this," one user wrote. Claire Oduwo, a Black psychiatry resident and self-proclaimed Taylor Swift fan, posted a video on TikTok with a caption that read, "I'm a Swiftie but this album is a flop." Some pointed out that slavery was still legal in the 1830s.

Others defended Swift. Stephanie Burt, a literary critic and professor at Harvard University who teaches a buzzy course on Swift, argues that Swift was critiquing herself as she did throughout most of the album.

Jay Stahl, USA TODAY, contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Taylor Swift's new 'Tortured Poets' album is most explicit yet