If you were paying super close attention to Taylor Swift’s “Opalite” music video, released in February this year, you would have noticed clues for her latest single, “Patient Zero”, scattered through it. If you had other things to be worrying about, it doesn’t matter: the song’s out now, and it might be hard for even the most zealous Swifties to stomach. It’s accompanied by three other tracks of varying quality, as part of an extended version of her 12th studio album, 2025’s The Life of a Showgirl.
Swift explained in an announcement this week that “Patient Zero”, “Cleveland!”, “Pink Clouding” and “Babylon” were written during a trip she made to Sweden, to celebrate the success of The Life of a Showgirl with producers Max Martin and Shellback. Really, these new tracks seem more like a standalone EP (Swift hasn’t released one of those since 2008’s Beautiful Eyes), so it’s a strange creative decision to tag them onto the worst-received album of Swift’s career... even if it did shatter sales records in its opening week.
