Taylor Swift appeared to team-up with The Empire State Building to tease a new project on Thursday (20.08.26).
The New York landmark was lit green, and its official X account posted a photo of the glow with the caption “WhaTS happening?”, using capital letters that matched Taylor Swift’s initials.
Earlier that day, a bright green TS logo was seen painted on a black wall at an undisclosed location. The symbol was photographed and shared online by fan groups.
More versions of the same emblem have since appeared in other unnamed spots across multiple cities. Fans noted that the font and layout do not match any of Taylor’’s previous album branding.
The Look What You Made Me Do singer has re-recorded four of her original six albums since 2021. The remaining titles are Reputation and her 2006 debut. Some fans pointed to Reputation’s black-and-green snake imagery as a possible link.
One fan suggested the design was “giving snake”. Another described it as “a mixture of [her] debut album’s aesthetic and Reputation’s”. Others suggested a new era entirely.
The Empire State Building has marked Taylor-related moments before. It turned orange in August 2025 for The Life of a Showgirl. It lit blue in July 2026 to mark her wedding to Travis Kelce.
Meanwhile,Taylor previously branded her fans a “little weird” for using “detective work” to figure out who she writes about in her songs.
The Grammy winner is famous for using her personal life as inspiration for her tracks and her devoted followers spend a lot of time trying to unpick her lyrics in a bid to work out who each song is about – and Taylor admitted it feels like a “paternity test”.
In an interview with New York Magazine, she explained: “There’s corners of my fanbase that are going to take things to a really extreme place.
“There’s nothing that I can do about that. There’s people who are going to try to like, do detective work, figure out the details – who is that about? What is this?
“When it gets a little bit weird for me is when people act like it’s sort of like a paternity test. Like: ‘This song’s about this person.’ Because I’m like: ‘That dude didn’t write the song. I did’.”
However, Taylor is adamant she doesn’t let others’ “perception” of her work influence her.
She added: “You have to hold tight to your perception of your art and your relationship with it, and then you just have to [think]: ‘There it goes, hope you like it! If you don’t now, hope you do in five years! And if you never do, then I was doing it for me anyway’.”
