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Evermore (stylized in all lowercase) is the ninth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was Surprise album on December 11, 2020, through Republic Records. Swift conceived Evermore as a "sister record" to its predecessor, Folklore, which had been released in July. She recorded Evermore mainly with Aaron Dessner at his Long Pond Studio in the Hudson Valley.
Evermore expands on Folklores Escapism fantasy songwriting with fictional narratives and delves into the imaginary world Swift had ideated while self-isolating during the COVID-19 pandemic. The songs explore the emotions—including longing, grief, nostalgia, and regret—that stem from unhappy endings of forbidden love, divorce, and infidelity. Evermore features an atmospheric indie folk, folk-pop, chamber rock, alternative rock, and alternative pop soundscape. Its spare arrangements and consist of guitars, pianos, String section, subtle synths, and programmed drums. Haim, the National, and Bon Iver appear as featured artists.
Evermore was supported by three singles that were each released to a different radio format in the US—"Willow" was released to contemporary hit radio and peaked atop the US Billboard Hot 100 chart; "No Body, No Crime" and "Coney Island" were released to Country radio and alternative radio. Evermore reached number one in Australia, Canada, Greece, New Zealand, Portugal, and the UK. In the US, it was Swift's eighth consecutive number-one debut on the Billboard 200 chart and was the best-selling alternative album of 2021, being certified four-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The album has also earned multi-platinum certifications in Australia, Brazil, Canada, and New Zealand.
Music journalism opined that Evermore was musically bold and experimental while expanding on the styles of Folklore. Many reviews lauded Swift's songwriting, deeming the character studies intricate and the narratives well-constructed; several were more reserved in their praise and considered the album not as groundbreaking as its predecessor. Evermore appeared in various publications' rankings of the best albums of 2020, and some listed it alongside Folklore. At the 64th Annual Grammy Awards in 2022, Evermore was nominated for Album of the Year.
Other first-time collaborators were Dessner's brother Bryce Dessner, who Orchestration several tracks; Justin Vernon of the indie folk band Bon Iver and Joe Alwyn (credited under the pseudonym William Bowery)—her boyfriend at the time—who co-wrote several songs. Due to lockdown restrictions, Swift recorded her vocals from her home studio in Los Angeles and sent audio files to Dessner and Antonoff, who operated from their studios on the US East Coast. Folklores indie folk and alternative rock sounds and fictional songwriting with imaginary characters and narratives were new aspects to Swift's artistry. The critical acclaim that Folklore received encouraged Swift to continue experimenting with its styles.
In September 2020, Swift, Antonoff, and Dessner convened to film the documentary in person at Dessner's Long Pond Studios in the Hudson Valley, one of the recording locations of Folklore. After filming, the three continued writing songs spontaneously during their stay at Long Pond. Dessner described their collaboration as a "weird avalanche" and a natural extension of their works on Folklore, but with more room for experimentation, as the two did not subject themselves to limitations. He would send Swift instrumentals, and she would write the lyrics to them and send the songs back to him. After Swift, Alwyn, and Vernon had written the song "Evermore", Dessner concluded that they were working on a new album.
Several Evermore tracks were created from scratch. Swift wrote two tracks, "Closure" and "Dorothea", for Dessner and Vernon's supergroup Big Red Machine; the songs were eventually recorded for Evermore. For "Closure", Vernon played a drum loop and Dessner added piano to it, imagining it as a track in 5/4 time. Dessner pinpointed "Closure" as the track that opened up more possibilities for the album, in that Swift and the production team did not subject themselves to any limitations. Dessner composed "Westerly", an instrumental track named after the town of Westerly, where Swift's Rhode Island home is located. Swift subsequently took an hour to write what became "Willow" on that instrumental. "No Body, No Crime" is the only Evermore track that Swift wrote without collaborators; she wrote it on a rubber-bridge guitar and sent Dessner a Voice Memos, which he produced upon. The track's feature artist, the pop rock band Haim, recorded their vocals at Ariel Rechtshaid's Los Angeles home and forwarded it to Swift and Dessner.
Other tracks were Dessner's works he had created for his own projects or Folklore. "Tis the Damn Season" was a product of Swift's songwriting when she was drunk and Dessner's instrumental track that he had written "a long time ago". "Coney Island" was based on a track that Dessner and Bryce had written for the National. Swift and Alwyn wrote the lyrics to it, and the National's lead singer Matt Berninger duetted with Swift while other members played instruments, including the drums, pocket piano, and bass. The bridge of "Marjorie" samples the drone from Folklores "Peace"; Swift wrote "Marjorie" about her maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, whose operatic vocals were also sampled. Dessner had started composing "Right Where You Left Me" and "Happiness" for Big Red Machine in 2019. Swift finished writing and recording the two songs as the last two for Evermore; "Happiness" was completed six days before the album was mastered. All 17 tracks were mixed by Jonathan Low at Long Pond.
Dessner's compositions are based on both acoustic and electronic instruments, largely characterized by programmed drum sounds using the iOS app FunkBox or analog drum generators such as the Vermona DRM1, the Roland TR-8 and TR-8s, and the Teenage Engineering OP-1; layered electric guitars; and piano-based arrangements using a Yamaha U1 upright piano. Bryce added orchestration to 13 songs. Compared to Folklore, Evermore retains the Minimal music soundscape and spare arrangements but is less consistent and more experimental: it has a more spacious Ambient music and its songs contain looser structures and textures and use varied instruments, namely or plucked guitars, glockenspiel, modular synthesizers, strings, and subtle layers of , , and .
Swift's vocals in Evermore are generally breathy and soft, accompanied by layered backing vocals, and deliver the songs in a conversational tone. In a profile for Sound on Sound, Tom Doyle wrote that Swift's voice "is very much front and centre and high in the mix, and generally sounds fairly dry". Dessner processed Swift's vocals such that they retained what he described as a "warmth" that he found lacking in "pop-oriented records" to sound "very bright and ... cut really well on the radio". The final song mixes were often the unedited mixes, such as the case of "Willow": Dessner said that the production team "settled back almost to the point where it began". According to the music theory professor Alyssa Barna, both Swift's singing and the song's arrangements embrace flat dynamics with little shifts in tempo or volume, and a static timbre that maintains consistent throughout each track: her timbre sounds "breathy and bright" when she sings in her upper register and "full and dark" in her lower.
In an Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe in December 2020, Swift detailed the relationship between Folklore and Evermore, which she designated as "sister records": whereas Folklore deals with "conflict resolution" and reconciliations, Evermore explores "endings of all sorts, sizes and shapes" and the painful aftermath. It details multiple themes related to unfulfilled romance—forbidden love, neglect, divorce, and infidelity—in addition to other painful endings such as fallen friendships and unrealized self-actualization. Narrated from the perspectives of complicated women who construct their stories from distant or recent memories, the songs are set in winter, particularly events related to the Christmas and holiday season such as returning to one's hometown during a weekend, a Christmas dinner, and a wrenching December that leaves one "feeling unmoored", as depicted in the title track.
Slates Carl Wilson dubbed Evermore an anthology without an integrated storyline, while Hyden and The A.V. Clubs Annie Zaleski contended that the wintry settings established a coherent throughline. Compared to the restraint of Folklore, Evermore is more uninhibited and playful, demonstrated through tracks like "No Body, No Crime", "Long Story Short", and "Dorothea", although most of the songs' narratives do not have . The overall mood of Evermore, nonetheless, is hopeful and warm, amidst the wintry settings and bittersweet feelings. In the view of the English literature scholar Maria Juko, while the title Evermore suggests the lasting legacy of the tales that have become folklore, the album's content questions the concept of eternity.
Despite its Escapist fiction fantasy concept, Evermore not only includes purely fictional stories but also narratives informed by Swift's biographical influences—as demonstrated most notably by the song "Marjorie". This type of narrative is autofiction—a combination of autobiography and fiction that presents perspectives of Swift's rather than her own self. Swift said that although there is an element of fiction to most of the songs, she still found herself in them. Commenting on Swift's framing of Evermore as a departure from her previous confessional, first-person songwriting, The New Yorkers Amanda Petrusich argued that every kind of writing is "an invention of sorts, honed and sharpened and shaped to fit a particular narrative".
"Tis the Damn Season" details a female character named Dorothea and her return to her hometown, Tupelo, during the Christmas holiday; she rekindles with a lover back in her high school days and wonders whether leaving her hometown for an acting career in Los Angeles was the right move. The spare arrangement of "Tis the Damn Season" combines a fingerpicked electric guitar riff and strings to evoke a nostalgic soundscape. Dessner and Bryce composed "Tolerate It" in 10/8, an odd time signature. The song is built on insistent programmed drum beats, an orchestration, and somber piano to depict the difficulties of loving someone "ambivalent", as described by Swift, inspired by Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca. The lyrics describe the young female narrator as yearning and in agony, and the male subject, who is much older, as aloof and unappreciative. "No Body, No Crime" combines Americana music and roots music styles such as country, folk, and old-school rock and roll, featuring police sirens and a harmonica in the background and a twang in Swift's vocals. Lyrically, it is a murder ballad that details a revenge plotted by a friend of a fictional character named Este, who was murdered by her husband: this friend kills the husband and frames his mistress for the crime.
"Happiness" is a melancholic, ambient ballad that incorporates synths, guitars, pianos, and church organs that build up from a soft drone to a soaring climax. The lyrics of "Happiness" tell the story of how a female narrator consoles herself and her ex-husband, navigating the aftermath of a divorce from their seven-year marriage; they draw parallels with the narrative of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby and directly reference the novel through Swift's description of the female narrator as "a beautiful fool" and invocation of the "green light" on Daisy Buchanan's dock beckoning Jay Gatsby. An acoustic Americana and folk song, "Dorothea" is instrumented by a honky-tonk piano, , and guitars; it is narrated from the perspective of the male subject in "Tis the Damn Season": he grew up with Dorothea in Tupelo and remains in their hometown but still longs for her and has observed her achievements from afar, wondering what it would be if they returned to the simple rural life before. "Coney Island" is an alternative rock and indie folk song featuring Swift, singing with melodious vocals, duetting with Berninger, using his baritone. Lyrically, it is a couple's nostalgic recount of their past romance in Coney Island.
"Ivy" is a folk song with lightweight guitar riffs, faint sleigh bells, , trumpet, and Vernon's gentle vocal harmonies. The lyrics of "Ivy" are about infidelity: a married person is in love with someone who is not their spouse, and their extramarital relationship develops from winter through spring, akin to ivy vines growing and winding around the narrator. By the end of the song, the marriage crumbles in a blazing battle due to the affair. In the melancholic track "Cowboy like Me", the narrator falls in love unexpectedly with a fellow con artist: even though both she and the subject had been scamming wealthy people by feigning love, their scheming on each other turned into real feelings, leaving the narrator anxious and heartbroken. Similar to "No Body, No Crime", "Cowboy like Me" evokes strong country music influences; it is instrumented by hushed guitars, harmonica, mandolin, piano, and backing vocals from Marcus Mumford. "Long Story Short" stands out musically from its preceding tracks thanks to its propulsive tempo, frantic drum machine beats, and strong pop influences. In the lyrics, the narrator reflects on her wrong romantic decisions due to low self-esteem, before announcing her present-day relief that she is finally in a healthy relationship.
"Marjorie" is Swift's tribute to her maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, an opera singer who died when Swift was 13. Its lyrics consist of Finlay's advice to her granddaughter, Swift's longing for her grandmother and yearning to keep her memory alive. Its gentle production incorporates rhythmic electronic synth pulses, warm piano, pizzicato strings, and samples Finlay's soprano vocals, taken from old records of her singing that Swift found. "Closure", described by various critics as the most experimental track on Evermore, is built in Quintuple meter, an odd time signature. Its instrumentation incorporates clattering, Industrial music-sounding electro-rock drums and acoustic piano. The lyrics of "Closure" are directed at a pretentious ex-lover: the narrator finds their act of reaching out patronizing, telling the ex-lover that there is no need for them to act out of pretentious amity. The album's closing track for the standard edition, "Evermore", is a piano ballad that progresses into a dramatic bridge with a tempo shift, where Swift is joined midway by Vernon's multitracked falsetto in a call and response. In the lyrics, Swift's narrator struggles through the dark days of November and December and eventually realizes that all the pain and depression is not permanent; she was influenced by the tough times she went through in 2016 and the uncertainty surrounding the 2020 US elections.
The two bonus tracks of Evermore, "Right Where You Left Me" and "It's Time To Go", expand on the indie folk sound. "Right Where You Left Me" is a folk-pop track with country influences, incorporating banjo, harmonica, harmonium, and twangy guitars that distort towards the conclusion. It depicts a female narrator's entrapment in heartbreak: she is still hurt over the moment that her ex-boyfriend left her in a restaurant years ago, comparing her own existence to that of a ghost, frozen in time, using imagery of dim lights, dropped hairpins, shattered glasses, and collected dust. In "It's Time to Go", the narrator details her decisions to leave an unhappy marriage in the first verse, to exit a toxic work environment in the second, and to stand up against a greedy person who had imprisoned her in the third. Musically, the track begins as an indie pop song set against insistent piano and one-note guitar sounds, before surging at the end with drums and slide guitar.
The artwork shows Swift, standing with her back to the camera, looking over a barren field with trees in the distance. She is wearing a French braid and a checked flannel coat from a collection by the English designer Stella McCartney, which sold out hours after the album's announcement. As with Folklore, Evermore embraces a cottagecore aesthetic that reflected the escapist fantasy content, which resonated with many listeners seeking comfort during the pandemic, and represented Swift's effort to reinvent her image. In the views of the English literature scholar Ryan Hibbett, the cover art shows Swift as a "fellow-spectator and thinker" rather than an object of sexualization common to pop stars.
Evermore was supported by three singles, each released to a different radio format in the US—a strategy Swift had implemented for Folklore. "Willow" was released to adult contemporary and pop radio, and its music video was unveiled the same day as the album's release. It was accompanied by seven official . "Willow" debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and peaked atop the Adult Pop Airplay chart in the US, and it also debuted atop the Australian ARIA Singles Chart. "No Body, No Crime" was released to US country radio on January 11, via Republic in collaboration with MCA Nashville, and "Coney Island" to US adult album alternative radio on January 18, 2021, via Republic.
Swift appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on December 14, 2020, to promote Evermore; she discussed the making of both Folklore and Evermore with the host Jimmy Kimmel. On a December 15, 2020, episode of Howard Stern's Sirius XM radio show, the English singer-songwriter Paul McCartney revealed that Swift had shared with him the planned release Evermore on December 18 to respect McCartney's planned December 11 release of his album McCartney III. Upon learning this, McCartney decided to release his album on December 18 instead, so that Swift could move forward with her Evermore rollout as initially planned.
On February 24, 2021, three weeks after the lawsuit, TAS Rights Management—Swift's company—Counterclaim the park for allegedly infringing Swift's songs "Love Story", "You Belong with Me", and "Bad Blood" by regularly using them in their performances without a Music licensing. In March 2021, a spokesperson for Swift stated to the press that both parties had resolved to dismiss their respective suits without monetary settlement.
Evermore spent four non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, aided by delayed physical releases such as autographed CDs and a record-breaking vinyl sales week: by selling 102,000 vinyl copies for the week ending June 3, 2021, the album registered the highest single-week vinyl figure since MRC Data began tracking US album sales in 1991. Evermore also debuted atop the Alternative Albums chart, dethroning Folklore; it spent 16 weeks at number one. According to MRC Data, it was the tenth-best-selling album of 2020 in the US and the sixth-best-selling of 2021. Evermore surpassed one million US album units as of April 2021 and was certified four-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America in September 2025.
Evermore also peaked at number one in Belgian Flanders, Canada, Greece, New Zealand, and Portugal. In Australia, the album earned a "Chart Double" when it debuted atop the ARIA Albums Chart and "Willow" atop the ARIA Singles Chart; topping the Australian chart 19 weeks after Folklore, it helped Swift register the shortest gap between two number-one albums, surpassing Ariana Grande's record of 25 weeks. In the UK, Evermore made Swift the female artist with the fastest duration to accumulate six number-one albums (2012–2020), surpassing Madonna (1997–2008); she also became the first female to score six chart toppers in the 21st century. Evermore was the best-selling Americana album of 2021 in the UK. The album has been certified triple platinum in Brazil, Canada, and New Zealand, double platinum in Australia, and platinum in Denmark, Poland, and the UK.
Swift's songwriting received unanimous praise. Reviews from The Independents Helen Brown, The Guardians Alexis Petridis, Stereogums Tom Breihan, and The Sydney Morning Heralds Lancaster Brodie lauded the character studies as intricate for depicting complex emotions with well-written stories, while those from Spins Bobby Olivier and NMEs Hannah Mylrea highlighted Swift's command of language, focusing on her wordplay and turn of phrase. Jon Pareles from The New York Times opined that the character studies of Evermore were more extensive than those in Folklore, and Patrick Ryan of USA Today thought that the imaginary world of Evermore was richer and "more spellbinding". Alan Light of Esquire considered Swift's songwriting mature and "even literary". A less enthusiastic review came from The Atlantics Spencer Kornhaber, who wrote that there were imprecise and self-indulgent metaphors that could have been edited.
Reception of the production and sounds was not as uniformly positive. On a positive side, multiple critics regarded Evermore as musically riskier and more experimental than Folklore, such as Light, Breihan, and Mylrea; several considered Evermore a better record than Folklore thanks to this greater musical reach, including Olivier, Zaleski, and Entertainment Weeklys Maura Johnston. There were compliments that deemed the production choices nuanced and meticulous from Pareles and Rolling Stones Claire Shaffer. Billboards Jason Lipshutz and Pitchforks Sam Sodomsky contended that the production choices complemented Swift's lyrics, while Clashs Shannon McDonagh wrote that Evermore built on what worked on Folklore to greater success. Samdosky and Varietys critic Chris Willman also praised Swift's expressive and agile vocals; the latter opined that the impressionist narratives fully "come into focus on second or third listen".
Some critics were more reserved in their praise. Brown, Breihan, and Robert Christgau contended that it took time for the melodies to fully draw the listeners in. Several reviews regarded Evermore as a sequel to Folklore and thus it was not as impactful as its predecessor, although they upheld the quality of the songcraft; these included Wilson, Hyden, and Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph. The Globe and Mails Brad Wheeler contended that Evermore was not as tuneful as Folklore but was more "album-oriented" and had a timeless quality. Kitty Empire of The Observer opined that the muted production "smears Vaseline on Swift's otherwise keen lens". Mikael Wood of the Los Angeles Times felt that while there were several "incredible songs", many Evermore tracks sounded like leftovers of Folklore, with unfinished experiments both musically and lyrically. In an outright negative review, Chris Richards of The Washington Post criticized the "indie" label and contended that while Folklore was surprising, Evermore turned out lyrically subpar, with "Marjorie" as the exception.
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The five-month gap between Folklore and Evermore received commentary in the press. Willman compared this short gap to the successes of the Beatles and U2 with Achtung Baby (1991) and Zooropa (1993), while Sheffield termed it a "hot streak" reminiscent of Prince in 1987, David Bowie in 1977, and Lil Wayne in 2007. Swift considered releasing Evermore a departure from her previous treatments of albums as "one-off eras" that required careful planning after each release cycle. In the views of Vultures Justin Curto, by abandoning traditional album rollouts involving extensive promotion and marketing, Evermore demonstrated Swift's embrace of artistic autonomy, which contributed to a larger discourse over album release strategies in the 2020s decade. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journals Neil Shah argued that the quick rollout was influenced by hip-hop and R&B artists who would release their music spontaneously—a strategy that proved to be lucrative in the streaming era.
Swift included songs from Evermore in an act as part of the Eras Tour, her sixth headlining concert tour, in 2023, having not toured since 2018's Reputation Stadium Tour due to the pandemic. Evermore, often analyzed together with Folklore, reinvented Swift's image from a pop star to an esteemed songwriter. According to Hibbett, the two albums aligned Swift with both the singer-songwriter tradition of the 1960s and 1970s and the contemporary indie rock scene. In doing so, they represented a paradox of "mainstream alternative" or "high-pop" binaries—contrasts between esteemed, poetic styles and accessible, "pop" styles—which Hibbett contended to have reached an unprecedented level due to Swift's "mega-stardom that brings to the table". Evermores embrace of the cottagecore aesthetic contributed to Swift's newfound popularity among liberal and queer audiences, who found solace in it to cope with the tumultuous times of American politics that entailed white supremacy, racism, and homophobia; several critics however alleged her of cultural appropriation and romanticizing the legacy of settler colonialism of white Americans in the US.
Sales revenues from Evermore helped Swift become 2020's highest-paid solo musician in the world and highest-paid musician overall in the US . Many publications attributed Evermore with Swift's status as one of the most prominent artists during the pandemic; Billboard cited it as a notable example of how the pandemic fostered new creative directions for musicians. Artists who have cited Evermore as an influence include Mia Dimšić, who was inspired to write "Guilty Pleasure", her entry song representing Croatia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2022; Christina Perri, who said that it reignited her passion to create melancholic, heartfelt songs without confirming her to making "happy" music; and Noah Kahan, who credited it with providing a mainstream prominence for his "brand of alt-folk". The Independent ranked Evermore 14th on their 2024 list of the 20 most underrated albums; Roisin O'Connor argued that it was "arguably ... her biggest creative flex".
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