Taylor Swift knows exactly what you're going through.

Swift dropped her latest single "Patient Zero" on Friday (September 25), one of four new songs featured on her new expanded album The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore. The track tells the story of a woman reaching out to her man's ex to get all the details from her own experience to see if he was as charming and toxic as he seems to be with her.

"If you wanna party with somebody/ who might know about the devil on his shoulder under his halo/ When the toxins take their hold, you'd rather die than let it go/ But if you're sick of him, I got you, I was patient zero," she sings in the chorus.

The musician, who will release the star-studded music video during the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards on September 27, revealed the inspiration behind the track comes from a conversation with friends, per People.

"The story behind me writing the song 'Patient Zero' is that I was hanging out with a bunch of friends, and one of my friends told us that she had been reached out to be the new girlfriend of an ex of hers, asking for guidance on if she had had the same experiences with this guy," she said in a statement. "Everyone in our group just immediately started saying like, 'Oh, I've been through that too,' and telling the stories of when this kind of reach out had happened for them."

Swift announced the "encore" edition of her 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl earlier this week, adding that the new tracks on the record come from a place of "pure gratitude" as she and collaborators Max Martin and Shellback reflected on response to the album nearly one year after its release.

"Really we just wanted to reflect and take in how grateful we were for the moment we were in, but there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: We wrote more songs," she said. "I hope you love them, because they were born out of pure gratitude for your exuberance for and celebration of the album we made."

You can listen to "Patient Zero" and The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore on iHeartRadio.

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