Taylor Swift fans argue The Tortured Poets Department is ‘mostly about’ ex Matty Healy – ‘Why girl, why?’ | HO

The Tortured Poets Department is out now and Taylor Swift fans believe the new album is “mostly about Matty Healy” and not Joe Alwyn.

Listen, analyze, dissect, repeat. Listen, analyze, dissect, repeat. Such is the way to approach a new Taylor Swift album, and The Tortured Poets Department is one fans will be simmering over for a very long time. The 34-year-old music icon dropped her eleventh studio album on Friday, April 19th 2024, and fans were surprised to discover the hotly anticipated project would also offer a double-album addition, The Anthology, offering 31 songs in total. Already, Swifties are scrambling to understand just how many of those tracks are about Matty Healy

Taylor Swift fans think The Tortured Poets Department ‘mostly about Matty Healy’

Although Taylor first met the frontman of the popular English band The 1975 back in 2014, the pair were romantically linked for a few months in 2023, People reports.

Headlines later focused on Taylor dating Travis Kelce, who she remains with today. However, most fans anticipated that The Tortured Poets Department would be about her ex Joe Alwyn, the English actor whom she began dating in 2016. The relationship ended after six years in early 2023, before she was linked to Matty.

Upon listening to the latest album, however, fans are arguing a lot of the lyrics feel like they’re about Matty, not Joe, after all.

“But Daddy I Love Him is definitely about Matty Healy,” one argued on X/Twitter. Another stressed that “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) being about [Matty] Healy was not on my bingo card.”

Swifties divided about perceived Matty Healy-inspired album

With the expectations that The Tortured Poets Department would explicitly be a Joe-centric album, the fandom is so far incredibly divided in their feelings so much of the record sounds as though it’s about her short stint with Matty.

“I’m really glad this album appears to be mostly about Matty Healy by the way,” a fan tweeted in support. “It means we can leave Joe Alwyn alone now. I always kinda loved the guy who inspired New Year’s Day, which for me is her best love song. Quiet. Understated. Real.”

On the other hand, there’s the fury. “Taylor Swift giving us her worst album ever after she sold it to us as the last chapter of her and Joe’s story but it ended up being about Matty Healy… only god knows why”

“Album about Joe Alwyn being about Matty Healy is a plot twist of the century,” one wrote in shock, with another clearly on one side of the fence tweeting, “I’m two songs [in] and have both songs so far been about Matty Healy? Why girl, why?”

Showing some love, one fan felt: “I’ll forgive her for writing Fresh Out The Slammer about Matty Healy because and only because it’s a banger.”

With fans citing the likes of The Black Dog and The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived as songs they strongly believe to be about Matty, the fandom is a wild place right now.

“I feel like I just went rifling through Matty Healy’s underwear drawer,” somebody hilariously tweeted upon diving into the LP’s behemoth 31 tracks.