Taylor Swift reveals ‘Midnights’ visual album with “music movies” featuring Laura Dern, Haim and more

21 October, 2022

Taylor Swift Midnights music movies

Right before releasing her hotly awaited 10th album, ‘Midnights’, Taylor Swift revealed that she’s made a series of “music movies” for it that will feature Laura Dern, Haim and more.

The first part of the visual album – a video for the record’s third track, ‘Anti-Hero’ – will premiere at 8am ET (or 1pm BST). In the meantime, Swift shared a trailer for the ‘Midnights’ video series, confirming the inclusion of Dern, Laith Ashley, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, John Early and Mike Birbiglia, as well as all three Haim sisters, collaborator Jack Antonoff, makeup artist Pat McGrath and model Dita Von Teese.

The trailer was premiered earlier in the night on Amazon Prime Video, where it was aired during this week’s Thursday Night Football. Swift has since posted the trailer on her own social media platforms – have a look at it below:

As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, the ‘Midnights’ video series reunited Swift with cinematographer Rina Yang, with whom she collaborated last year on her short film All Too Well. In a statement published by THR, Swift said: “I love storytelling, I love songwriting, I love writing videos, I love directing them. And this was a really fun opportunity to work again with the cinematographer Rina Yang.”

Swift teased that the videos would dive into “the world of this record”, noting that she and Yang “wanted to challenge ourselves to do different things this time around”. The singer-songwriter continued: “I’m really proud of what we made and I really hope you like them. We worked with some amazing actors, which you’ll find out more about at the end of the teaser trailer.”

‘Midnights’ is Swift’s first visual album, after making her directorial debut with the All Too Well short – which will qualify for next year’s Oscars – last November. That film starred Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) and Dylan O’Brien (The Maze Runner), and after premiering it in Manhattan, Swift took it to New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, where she declared that “it would be fantastic to write and direct a feature”. 

NME’s review of All Too Well said it “highlights the emotional power of [Swift’s] storytelling”.

In a statement commemorating the release of ‘Midnights’, Swift described it as “a wild ride of an album” and called Antonoff her “co-pilot” in its creation. She wrote: “He’s my friend for life (presumptuous I know but I stand by it) and we’ve been making music together for nearly a decade HOWEVER… this is our first album we’ve done with just the two of us as main collaborators.

“We’d been toying with ideas and had written a few things we loved, but ‘Midnights’ actually really coalesced and flowed out of us when our partners (both actors) did a film together in Panama. Jack and I found ourselves back in New York, alone, recording every night, staying up late and exploring old memories and midnights past.”

Swift also thanked the other collaborators on the album, including Lana Del Rey (who features on the song ‘Snow On The Beach’), Zoë Kravitz (who co-wrote ‘Karma’ and ‘Lavender Haze’), William Bowery (the pseudonym of her boyfriend Joe Alwyn), and more.

Swift went on to call ‘Midnights’ a “collage of intensity, highs and lows and ebbs and flows. Life can be dark, starry, cloudy, terrifying, electrifying, hot, cold, romantic or lonely. Just like ‘Midnights’. Which is out now.”

Swift revealed last month that she worked with Antonoff on ‘Midnights’. The pair have worked together on each of Swift’s last five albums, from 2014’s ‘1989’ through to her 2020 lockdown albums ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’, as well as last year’s re-recorded versions of ‘Fearless’ and ‘Red’. 

In a four-star review of ‘Midnights’, NME’s Hannah Mylrea wrote: “The country roots she revisited on her re-recorded albums is nowhere to be found, and folk influences of her lockdown projects are largely absent. Instead she spins these new stories through sleek synth-pop, in common with ‘1989’ or ‘Lover’, but the razor-sharp production of these albums is more subtle this time around.”

Meanwhile, Swift will appear as a guest on Monday’s (October 24) episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, before dropping by The Graham Norton Show next Friday (October 28). 

Earlier this week, Swift confirmed that a UK tour in support of ‘Midnights’ will be announced soon. Fans who pre-ordered the album will be able to access an exclusive pre-sale for tickets.

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