Taylor Swift reopens Showgirl 357 days later with four new songs
Taylor Swift will release The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore on September 25, 2026, adding four songs made with Max Martin and Shellback. Every earlier Swift expansion came within hours or weeks of the album; this one comes 357 days after it.
By Riffiter
Taylor Swift announced The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore on Instagram on September 23. It adds four new songs to her 2025 album: "Patient Zero", "Cleveland!", "Pink Clouding" and "Babylon". She made them with Max Martin and Shellback on a trip to Sweden. The Encore is out Friday, September 25.
A year, not a night
Swift has reopened finished albums before, but always fast. Midnights (3am Edition) added seven songs about three hours after the album came out in 2022. The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology added fifteen, two hours in, in 2024. Both were planned as a same-night twist.
The slower ones were still quick. folklore got its bonus track, "the lakes", 25 days after release. evermore got two more songs 27 days in. Showgirl itself already has an Acoustic Collection, 35 days after the album.
The Encore lands 357 days after The Life of a Showgirl. Nothing else in her catalog comes close.
| Edition | New songs | After the album |
|---|---|---|
| Midnights (3am Edition) | 7 | ~3 hours |
| The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology | 15 | ~2 hours |
| folklore (deluxe) | 1 | 25 days |
| evermore (deluxe) | 2 | 27 days |
| The Life of a Showgirl + Acoustic Collection | acoustic versions | 35 days |
| The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore | 4 | 357 days |
The record she is going back to
The Life of a Showgirl moved 4.002 million equivalent units in its first US week, per Luminate, 3.479 million of them as pure sales. That is the biggest week Luminate has measured since it started tracking in 1991, and it took the record from Adele's 25, which did 3.378 million in 2015. Swift points at that number herself in the announcement: "You gave The Life of a Showgirl the biggest first week for an album in history."
Critics were cooler. Metacritic opened in the high 70s on the first handful of reviews and settled at 69 across 23. Pitchfork gave it 5.9.
The four new songs go to that album, the one buyers loved more than critics did. They arrive with two days' notice, so there is no window to review them on their own before they become part of the record.
What is known about the songs
Only the titles and the producers. No lyrics or full credits had been published by the time of the announcement. "Cleveland!" is being read in coverage as a nod to Travis Kelce, who grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Swift has not said that, and nobody outside the sessions has heard the song.