Taylor Swift's Cryptic Social Media Clues Have Reached a Breaking Point

Release! The! Album!

Every day since April 13, Taylor Swift has posted a brand-new, cryptic, Easter egg-colored, zoomed-in image — a jewel heart, her painted fingernails, various costumes, the cats. As of April 22, that is 11 straight days of essentially indecipherable Taylor Swift clues, and enough is enough.

The world is only two days out from whatever Taylor is releasing (a single? an album? an engagement announcement? a clothing line?), and I'll admit it, I'm already exhausted, even as a well-established Taylor aficionado. Sure, Taylor's meticulously curated Instagram feed is gorgeous to look at, but it's made of what are perhaps the most useless clues ever. This feels notable for Taylor, who has tended to choose statement over subtlety: I miss the f/*cking Reputation snakes, OK! And don't even get me started on my love for the "hidden" messages in her album- lyric booklets.

But now, each day's Instagram post notification comes with a tingle of excitement and a pinch of dread. Basically, I already know what the photo will be (though I'll admit the chickens in sunglasses pic threw me), and I know it will have no caption with further insight. I know the comments will still be disabled, so I can't even commiserate with thousands of other impatient Swifties (that's what Twitter is for, I guess?). At this point, Taylor Swift is a one-woman Glossier phone-background generator.

All of these new teasers don't even include the March/April hype cycle in which fans numerologied Taylor's old pictures to death — the doorknobs! The stars in the sky! The holes in the fence! IT'S ALL SO MUCH AND YET NOTHING AT ALL.

In conclusion, Taylor continues to emphatically reject the surprise-album drop era ushered in by Beyoncé, preferring instead to protract what is probably an album rollout until her typical release months of October and November. I swear to the pop goddesses themselves, what comes on Friday better not be an announcement of a future announcement.

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