GRAB YOUR MAGNIFYING glass and don your tinfoil hat. Taylor Swift is dropping hints that need analysing.

Today, she released bonus tracks from her last album The Life of a Showgirl, but fans speculate she’s got something else up her sleeve. 

The music video for one of the new songs, Patient Zero, will premiere at MTV’s Video Music Awards (VMAs) this weekend. It features Dakota Johnson and our own Colin Farrell.

Swift at the VMAs in 2022 Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Swift has a long history with the awards show, and she’s often used music videos as nests for her famous “Easter eggs” – hints at projects to come.

This year she’ll be the first recipient of a new honour recognising director-musicians for their work behind the camera. While accepting an award at the 2022 VMAs, she announced her album Midnights. Could she announce another on Sunday?

Here’s what the veteran theorists are thinking.

1. Debut (Taylor’s Version)

There are only two of her albums she has yet to release re-recorded versions of out of her entire collection. The first is her self-titled debut.

Her screechy 16-year-old voice sang songs she wrote as a child that transcended generations.

She told fans last year when she bought back her masters that she’d finished re-recording it and would put it out “when the time is right”. 

The album’s 20th anniversary falls next month, which could be that perfect moment. 

Swift with her albums after she bought back her masters Instagram Instagram

Swift’s recent collaboration with Toy Story, for which she wrote the end credits song I Knew It, I Knew You, evokes the same country sound and sentimental values of her debut.

She’s also been seen cosying up to country artists. She surprised fans in Nashville when she joined Lainey Wilson on stage at a local live music event.

Swift has said she’ll attend the Country Music Awards in November for the first time in 10 years. That can’t be a coincidence.

2. Reputation vault tracks

The second album we have yet to hear a full re-recording of is Reputation. She previously told fans that she was struggling to recreate the “shame-born snarl” of the original. She said it was the only album she felt couldn’t be improved upon.

Fans also surmised that remaking songs about the genesis of her seven-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn may be too painful.

However, it’s what wasn’t on the original album that fans are more eager to hear.

The elusive unreleased vault tracks are speculated to be her best work.

“There will be a time (if you’re into the idea) for the unreleased Vault tracks from that album to hatch,” she wrote in a letter to fans.

We’re into it, Taylor.

Hints were also dropped during her Emmys skit with the cast of Law and Order.

At one point she turns to the camera and says a seemingly random combination of words: saccharide, Aries, from the vineyard, north and south.

Fans believe it was an anagram. Unscrambled, it says: “My first record’s re-record is out Nov ten.”

This date, 10 November, is significant as it’s when she released the original Reputation album in 2017.

Her cat, Olivia Benson’s, birthday is also on 10 November. The pet appeared in the skit with actress Mariska Hargitay who plays her namesake in Law and Order.

3. A lost album

This next theory is a deep cut, but no less compelling.

For years, fans have speculated that Swift recorded an album after 1989 that she ultimately shelved.

After she was “cancelled” due to her 2016 feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, Swift wrote Reputation. It was about being hated, betrayed, and misunderstood publicly, all while falling in love privately. 

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Fans believe the dramatic turn in Swift’s personal life led her to change creative direction, leaving behind a pop-rock album called Karma.

If you don’t know, Swift chooses a colour to correspond with each “era”. Her management uses heart emojis when making posts about (or hinting at) a certain album. Fans have long associated orange – the only colour heart not yet claimed – with the forgotten album.

While the artwork for The Life of a Showgirl includes lots of orange, her management has held off on using the orange heart emoji.

Could they be saving it for Karma? 

In the Emmys skit, Swift told viewers that the clues are “hidden in plain sight”. But one theorist says she may have said “hidden in plane sight”.

Stay with me.

In the Look What You Made Me Do music video, clones of Swift from her different eras appear in front of a plane. But one clone couldn’t be identified. She is holding a chainsaw and cutting off the wing of the plane, the tail of which says (in very faint writing) “TS6″. Is Karma the sixth studio album that could never take off?

In the same music video, Swift wears an orange jumpsuit while swinging inside a cage, which may symbolise Karma being trapped in the vault.

Later, in the Lover era, her music video for The Man shows a wall with the names of each of her ‘stolen’ albums graffitied on it. Alongside them is Karma written twice.

At the end of the Fate of Ophelia music video, an orange bird flies out the window. Could this be Karma escaping from the vault?

Fans have speculated that there may be more than one major release in store, as Swift keeps referring to the number two.

In the Opalite music video, she sings “all of the foes and all of the friends have seen it before, they’ll see it again”. She then flashes a peace sign and says “two” to the bar woman, before a television is shown with MTV playing on it. People think this could mean two announcements at the VMAs.

At 2pm New York time today, two vinyl records for her new single Patient Zero were released on her website. 

Irish fans who want to tune into the VMAs can watch at 12.30am on Monday on Paramount+.