Taylor Swift announced folklore on July 23, 2020, and released it at midnight on July 24, with no promotional campaign in advance. Her eighth studio album was written and recorded while the COVID 19 pandemic had shut down touring and much of the music industry, and it arrived less than a year after Lover, the first album she released through Republic Records. Swift was 30 when folklore came out. The documentary Miss Americana, released earlier that year, had followed the making of that previous album, as told in Miss Americana.

Swift made the album with two producers. Jack Antonoff, her collaborator since 1989, worked with her again, and Aaron Dessner, a founding member of the rock band The National, produced and cowrote most of the songs. Much of the work was done remotely, with files exchanged between the collaborators while each stayed home. Bon Iver's Justin Vernon sang with Swift on "exile." The sound moved away from the pop production of her recent albums toward quieter alternative and folk arrangements, and many of the songs told stories about invented characters rather than her own life.

Five months later, in December 2020, Swift released evermore, a companion album made with the same team, which included "marjorie," a tribute to her grandmother, the opera singer Marjorie Finlay, whose recordings are sampled in the background of the track.

On March 14, 2021, folklore won Album of the Year at the 63rd Grammy Awards, making Swift the first woman to win the award three times. Her earlier wins had come for Fearless in 2010 and 1989 in 2016, and she performed songs from the album at the ceremony with Dessner and Antonoff.

The album's success came during the period in which Swift had begun rerecording her first six albums, after Scooter Braun's acquisition of her masters in 2019, told in Battle of Masters. In February 2024, Swift won Album of the Year a fourth time, for Midnights, becoming the first artist ever to do so, as told in Anti-Hero. Songs from folklore and evermore later formed their own acts of the Eras Tour, staged as a cabin in the woods.