Taylor Swift has quietly turned The Life of a Showgirl into a longer record. On Friday 25 September, she released The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, an expanded edition of her twelfth studio album that adds four previously unheard songs, all written and produced with her longtime collaborators Max Martin and Shellback.
The extra material reportedly grew out of a celebratory trip to Sweden, where Swift and the pair had planned to mark the original album’s record-breaking opening week. The session turned into something more than a celebration, she said, explaining that “there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: we wrote more songs.” She’s described the four additions as coming from gratitude for how fans responded to the record the first time round.
Leading the new material is ‘Patient Zero’, whose official video doubled as one of the night’s biggest music moments at the 2026 MTV VMAs. Directed by Swift herself and shot by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (The Revenant, Birdman, Gravity), the video stars Colin Farrell and Dakota Johnson and premiered globally during Sunday’s ceremony, where Swift also picked up the inaugural VMA Artist Director Honours.
The other three new tracks, ‘Cleveland!’, ‘Pink Clouding’ and ‘Babylon’, round out an expanded tracklist that folds the original twelve-song album and the new four-song run into a single 16-track edition. The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore is streaming now.
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