Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Encore: The 4 New Songs and When They Drop

• Taylor Swift is releasing The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore — her 2025 album plus four new songs — on Friday, Sept. 25.
• The new tracks are “Patient Zero,” “Cleveland!,” “Pink Clouding” and “Babylon,” written in Sweden with Max Martin and Shellback.
• They are her first new songs since she married Travis Kelce in July.

Encore it is. Taylor Swift, 36, announced Wednesday (Sept. 23) that The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, her 2025 album with four new songs added as tracks 13 through 16, arrives Friday, Sept. 25. It is her first new music since her July 3 wedding to Travis Kelce.

The original 12-song album came out Oct. 3, 2025, and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 4.002 million units, the biggest week for any album since sales tracking began in 1991. Swift says that week is why the new songs exist.

What songs are on The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore?

The four additions, in order: “Patient Zero” (track 13), “Cleveland!” (14), “Pink Clouding” (15) and “Babylon” (16). “Patient Zero” was announced first, on Tuesday, as a single. A day later, the pre-order pages showed it was part of a bigger release.

Swift wrote them with Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish producers behind the original album and, before that, 2017’s Reputation. She explained how it happened on Instagram:

“I took a trip to Sweden to celebrate with Max and Shellback, my two collaborators on this album … there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: We wrote more songs.”

— Taylor Swift, on Instagram

The cover photos are by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, who shot the original Showgirl imagery.

What time does The Encore come out?

The album reaches streaming services as Thursday night turns into Friday, Sept. 25. Her last album went live at midnight Eastern, which is 9 p.m. Thursday on the West Coast. Apple Music lists the new songs as a second disc; Spotify runs all 16 tracks in one order.

No physical edition of The Encore has been announced. “Patient Zero” did get three collector’s CD singles, sold on Swift’s website for 24 hours only, with an acoustic and a piano version.

What are “Cleveland!” and “Pink Clouding” about?

No lyrics have been released, and Swift hasn’t explained any of the titles. What’s public is the context. Cleveland is Kelce’s home turf: he grew up in Cleveland Heights, and in March the couple bought a lakefront estate in Bratenahl, on the city’s eastern edge.

“Pink cloud” is a phrase from Alcoholics Anonymous circles for the rush of euphoria some people feel early in sobriety — the honeymoon phase of recovery. In the U.S., searches for “pink clouding” jumped on Wednesday, according to Google Trends.

For “Patient Zero,” fans pointed to a 2024 Los Angeles Times story on her romance with Kelce that described Swift as “patient zero for emotional contagion” — the idea, from anthropologist Helen Fisher, that feelings spread from person to person. “Babylon” has no public clue yet.

How did Taylor Swift tease the Encore?

For weeks, in plain sight. Her Opalite music video had the phrase “Patient for the encore” at the edge of the frame. On Sept. 14, in a Law & Order: SVU sketch taped for the Emmys, she looked into the camera and said four words and phrases: “Saccharide. Aries. From the vineyard. North or south.”

Fans said the third letters of her phrases, rearranged, spelled “encore.” Then, on Tuesday, her Instagram and X bios switched letters for zeros: “And, baby, that’s sh0w business f0r y0u.” Her cameo, and Kelce’s joke about it, are in our story on Travis Kelce and the Emmys gift.

Some fans still expect a rerecording of her 2006 debut album this fall, for its 20th anniversary; she has not announced one. Everything we’ve published on her is on our Taylor Swift page, including whether she’ll be at the Chiefs game this week. More new releases are in our Music section.

— Bruno Monteiro

Sources: Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Instagram and X, Sept. 22–23, 2026; pre-order listings on Apple Music and Spotify; Billboard (first-week data for The Life of a Showgirl, Oct. 2025); Google Trends (U.S. searches, Sept. 23, 2026). Track list and release details as reported by Variety (Chris Willman) and Yahoo Entertainment (Neia Balao); the Los Angeles Times story (Amy Kaufman, 2024) as cited by Pete Grathoff (Kansas City Star, via Yahoo). “Pink cloud” as used in addiction recovery: The Recovery Village. Photos: frames from the Television Academy’s official video of the SVU sketch (78th Emmys, Sept. 14, 2026) and from New Heights (August 2025).