Taylor Swift announces new album, The Life Of A Showgirl, and drops a strong musical hint that Max Martin is back in the producer's chair

Taylor Swift clearly doesn’t do holidays.

It’s just eight months since her record-breaking Eras tour came to a close last December. But in that time she’s written and recorded a new album, which was announced earlier this morning on her boyfriend, Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast.

It’s called The Life Of A Showgirl and it will be her 12th record of original material. Indeed, it will be her sixth in the last six years and that doesn’t include the four re-recorded ‘Taylor’s versions’ of previous albums that have also been released in that same timeframe.

The podcast is not out until Wednesday but the clip in which Swift makes the announcement has already been teased. See below.

On top of that there was some serious teasing being done on Swift’s own website. Last night there was a countdown to 12:12 am Eastern Time (on 12 August – are you detecting a theme yet?) Meanwhile, over on Instagram, Taylor Nation, which is a branch of the singer’s marketing operation, was showing a carousel of 12 images from the Eras tour together with the caption: “Thinking about when she said ‘See you next era …’”

Then when it came to 12:12 Swift’s website crashed, before returning a little later with some information about the album – the album will ship by Monday 13 October, though with the caveat: “**THIS IS NOT THE RELEASE DATE, OFFICIAL RELEASE DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED**.”

Doubtless we’ll get some more information about the project in due course, but there are already strong indications that it will be produced not by Jack Antonoff, who's helmed the majority of Swift's recent albums, but pure pop powerhouses Max Martin and Shellback. To coincide with the album announcement, Swift also curated a Spotify playlist - And, baby, that's show business for you - that's exclusively made up of previous songs that she's made with the Swedish duo. Make of that what you will.

In the meantime you have to take your hat off to the singer for her flabbergasting work ethic. At pop’s top table it’s not unusual for artists to take years off between albums, especially after long global tours.

That’s not surprising – it takes time to get creative juices and ideas flowing once more. But Swift is not like other pop stars. Quite what drives her is unclear - fame and riches in all likelihood ceased to be motivating factors some time ago -but perhaps she’ll tell us when that New Heights podcast goes out tomorrow.