With the release of Taylor Swift’s eleventh album in just three days, the pop superstar is building hype the way she does best: with a scavenger hunt.
On April 15, the Monday before “The Tortured Poets Department” debuted on April 19, a curious mural appeared on the side of a Chicago building. The image is littered with the letters “TTPD” and the number 13, telltale signs that this mural is for Swifties. At its center is a large QR code, and people have been lining up to check it out.
Investigative TikTok fans discovered that, when scanned with a smartphone camera, the QR code leads to a short YouTube film on Taylor Swift’s official page: a brief clip with the message ” Error 321”.
Swifties will remember that “error 321” appeared in another post that Swift let her followers decode earlier in the year.
Hours before she announced “The Tortured Poets Department” at the Grammys in February, Swift’s official website went dark and read the message:
Error 321 Backend recovery failed
Backend recovery failed
hneriergrd
TPD: 321
Varnish Cache Server
The Swifties were then able to decode part of the message. The confusing expression “hneriergrd” was an anagram for “red herring”. “DPT: 321,” if decoded backwards, alludes to the title of the new album, “The Tortured Poets Department.”
It appears that this QR code traced in Chicago was the first of many clues Swift had traced during her latest scavenger hunt. We’ll have to wait to see what else she has up her sleeve.
