It never pays to turn your back on Taylor Swift. One day, she’s absolutely roasting some handsy asshole in court; the next, she’s abruptly releasing all of her music onto streaming services as part of some kind of convoluted revenge play against Katy Perry. So when the massively successful pop star suddenly sent her entire online presence—Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Taylorswift.com—dark this week, scrubbing tweets and setting everything to a blank black background, we have to assume that something major is up.
The obvious notion is that Swift is getting ready to announce a new album, her first since blockbuster hit 1989 arrived back in 2014. Outside some work on the Fifty Shades Darker soundtrack, Swift hasn’t released any new music in that three-year period, so we’re probably due. That being said, if we were capable of accurately predicting Taylor Swift’s actions—and, thus, capable of thinking like her for at least some of the time—we’d presumably be unknowable pop music geniuses ourselves, so who can really say?