Here’s Every Single Easter Egg and Theory About Taylor Swift’s New Song “Archer”

From Cosmopolitan

• Taylor Swift just surprised fans by dropping her new song “Archer” from her forthcoming album, Lover.

• It’s the fifth song on the album, and Taylor teased that it was an emotional one for her.

Surprise! Taylor Swift just dropped a song from her new album, Lover. It’s called “Archer” and there’s no music video for it yet, but the lyrics are here and absolutely need your decoding. Who is it about? What does it mean? Etc., etc.

Please proceed into this hot mess hodgepodge of theories, Easter eggs, and lyric explanations for this new song.

FYI, here’s the lyric video. Give her a watch/listen before you keep reading.

First, Taylor said it was an emotional song for her.

In an Instagram Live she did right before the song dropped, she said her fans pointed out a while ago that she always makes the fifth song on her albums a really emotional one. For example, “Delicate” was the fifth song on Reputation. Since her fans pointed it out, she’s been doing it on purpose, so this song is definitely one that’s close to her heart. Good to know. Valuable intel.

People think it’s related to “Delicate.”

Backtracking slightly, fans discovered that The Archer is a dive bar in East London. In “Delicate,” Taylor sang about a dive bar on the east side, so naturally, people think the two songs are related somehow.

This brought people back to the “Delicate” video, where Taylor reads a note in a bar but the viewers never see the note. People think this might mean they finally get to see what’s on the note.

And there’s another dive bar tie-in.

There’s also a dive bar on the east side of NYC called Lovers of Today. So she’s really going *in* on this whole dive-bar situation.

Some more “Delicate” proof.

This woman! Her mind!

She might have given an Easter egg for this months ago.

Aside from putting the bull’s-eye and the number five in her “You Need to Calm Down” video, it looks like Taylor dropped a hint about this song months ago in an Elle profile.

“An old American sitcom called Archer is about a spy who has issues with ‘his friends and colleagues who live to undermine and betray one another.’ Lesson 5 in Elle U.S. is about banishing people who hurt you and cause drama. This is the narrative of track 5, ‘Archer.’”

So is this song about friends who betray one another? HELP.

She hinted at this in the “ME!” video.

HELP us one and all. This woman is a mastermind.

Wait, circling back, what is this song actually about?

Okay, so there seem to be two major competing theories here. First, if “Delicate” was supposedly about Joe Alwyn and this is a follow-up to “Delicate,” this song should theoretically also be about Joe, right?

The issues with that are the “banish the drama” theory and the fact that in the song, she talks about how all her enemies started as friends. So is this...about her friends? She also says all her heroes died alone. WHO DIED? So yeah, we’re not quite ready to be conclusive on this one, but we’ll update this post if better theories become available.

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