The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift's twelfth studio album, was released on October 3, 2025. It was the first album she released after buying back the master recordings of her first six albums from the private equity firm Shamrock Capital in May 2025, ending the dispute told in Battle of Masters. Shamrock had acquired those recordings in November 2020 from Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings, which had bought Swift's first label, Big Machine Label Group, in June 2019.

Swift announced the album in August 2025 during an appearance on New Heights, the podcast hosted by Travis Kelce and his brother Jason Kelce, weeks before she and Kelce announced their engagement. On that episode she revealed the cover art, a collage style photograph by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott that shows her partly submerged in water in a silver beaded top, with turquoise and orange tones that she used to tease the new era.

The album broke the record for the biggest first week in the modern era of American music. It opened with 4.002 million equivalent album units in the United States, including 3,479,500 pure album sales, and it became the first album to earn more than four million units in a single week. The total passed the previous record of 3.482 million units, set by Adele's 25 in 2015.

The songs dominated the singles chart as well. "The Fate of Ophelia" debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the top 12 positions on the chart were all held by tracks from the album, extending the sweep Swift had first achieved with Midnights in 2022, told in Anti-Hero.

"The Fate of Ophelia" later passed "Anti-Hero" as Swift's longest running No. 1 single, according to Rolling Stone; "Anti-Hero" had held that title since January 2023 with eight weeks at the top, as told in Anti-Hero.

The release was Swift's first album of new material since The Tortured Poets Department in April 2024, and it arrived less than a year after the final show of the Eras Tour in Vancouver on December 8, 2024. With the album, the singer entered her twelfth era as the owner of every recording she had ever made.