The riddle-loving Taylor Swift challenged her fans to an online scavenger hunt this week, and it appears that the task was successful.
The pop queen fulfilled her promise to unveil the vault tracks on her upcoming “1989” re-record after giving her army of Swifties a race to decode dozens and dozens of word clues on Google (more on that below).
The *search* was worth the pain, because we got a long list of #1989TaylorsVersionVault Tracks!!!!! 😮💨🔓🩵 pic.twitter.com/Gjs2mBbtyO
— Taylor Nation (@taylornation13) September 20, 2023
On September 20, Swift released the names of four of the five tracks from her promised vault via her Taylor Nation social media accounts:
- “Is It Over Now?”
- “Now That We Don’t Talk”
- “Say Don’t Go”
- “Suburban Legends”
The title of the fifth vault track, however, is still a mystery left for fans to decode.
Also on Sept. 20, Taylor Nation shared a new clip teasing a track that it had teased the day before in a similar video. It shows a graphic of a vault with the letters “T-S-!-U-L” emerging from it.
“But what about the 5th #1989TaylorsVersionVault track?” Taylor Nation captioned the post.
But what about the 5th #1989TaylorsVersionVault track? pic.twitter.com/7Lx6NLZfkO
— Taylor Nation (@taylornation13) September 20, 2023
Fans are social media debated what the word spells, with many thinking “slut!” or “lust!”
“I’m so sure it’s “SLUT!” It makes so much more sense with the apostrophes and the exclamation, also the narrative that ppl made up of her at the time,” one commenter on Reddit wrote.
“It’s almost certainly ‘LUST!’, but I’d give anything for a song called ‘SLUT!’ from her,” another person commented.
“If it didn’t have the quotes and exclamation point I’d say lust,” someone else responded. “With those: one hundred percent ‘SLUT!’”
Vault tracks — aka, songs left on the cutting room floor when an album was originally released — have appeared on every re-record that Swift has dropped so far.
Need some catching up on this whole “1989” vault track business? Read all about it below.
How Google factors into all *this*
On September 19, Google and Swift began a campaign for fans eager to learn what the meaning of the scrambled letters “T-S-!-U-L” is.
In a blog post, Google detailed the game: The Google search engine claims that a blue vault will show when a user types “Taylor Swift” into the search field. In order to solve one of the word puzzles, fans can click on it. There are a total of 89 problems to solve. Swift will divulge the names of the future songs if her fans can solve a total of 33 million puzzles (Swift is 33).
“Dying to see how this one ends? We promise that the wait isn’t gonna be forever, but the prize will definitely be worth the pain,” a Google release reads. “Cause darling, we’re a Swiftie dressed like a search engine.”
However, two editors attempted to do this but were not presented with a blue vault. Social media users began complaining on platforms as well about not being able to see the vault, while #WheresTheVault began trending on X, the platform formally known as Twitter, by the afternoon of Sept. 19.
We reached out to Google to find out why the vault does not appear for some but did not hear back by the time of publication. However, the search engine tweeted late Sept. 19 that the “vault is jammed.”
Swifties, the vault is jammed! But don’t worry, there are no blank spaces inside. We’re in our fix-it era and will be out of the woods soon 🩵 https://t.co/2Ija1pbnnf
— Google (@Google) September 19, 2023
“Swifties, the vault is jammed!” read the tweet. “But don’t worry, there are no blank spaces inside. We’re in our fix-it era and will be out of the woods soon.”