Taylor Swift is a grasp of breakup songs, however maybe none of these tracks has married heartbreaking lyrics and a really danceable beat like “Hits Different.” Again when “Midnights” was launched in October 2022, “Hits Different” was unique to the deluxe version of the album that was bought at Goal. Whereas some enterprising followers ripped the track from their CDs and uploaded it on-line, Swift waited a couple of months to make the track accessible in every single place. On Could 26, Swift launched the “Til Dawn” model of “Midnights” that features “Hits Different,” plus a “Karma” remix with Ice Spice and a brand new model of “Snow on the Beach” with “more” from collaborator Lana Del Rey. And on June 4, Swift carried out the track dwell for the very first time as a shock monitor on her Eras Tour. “I don’t know if you’ll know this one. It’s pretty new,” she stated earlier than she started. “But we’ll see.” In fact, as soon as she began, followers screamed alongside.

Like with all of her breakup songs, many followers have puzzled what Swift’s “Hits Different” means and who it is about. The track particulars how a selected breakup feels so totally different from those Swift has had earlier than: it hits totally different. The reply about which relationship impressed it, although, is not completely clear. Swift and Joe Alwyn break up earlier this 12 months, however information of their separation solely broke in April, many months after “Midnights”‘s launch. Nonetheless, many followers imagine songs on the album are in regards to the finish of their six-year romance, although they appeared to nonetheless be collectively on the time.

However there are components of the track that trace at Swift’s different exes. “I washed my hands of us at the club,” she sings at first of the monitor. That might allude to Swift’s ex DJ Calvin Harris, although there aren’t very many different clues about him.

An enormous a part of “Hits Different” is about how Swift normally can transfer on rapidly from breakups, and at first of the second verse, she sings, “I used to switch out these Kens / I’d just ghost.” As Ryan Gosling (who performs Ken within the “Barbie” film) has stated repeatedly, the entire level of a Ken doll is to be an adjunct to Barbie, a assist. Actually, because the film’s director Greta Gerwig famous in a Vogue article revealed on Could 24, Ken got here into being after Barbie as a result of folks wrote Mattel letters begging to get Barbie a boyfriend. Swift evokes that historical past with this line about her exes being “Kens.”

A number of the track’s lyrics additionally bring to mind her track “Cornelia Street,” which most followers imagine is in regards to the begin of her romance with Alwyn. In that track, she sings {that a} break up could be “the type of heartbreak time would never mend.” In “Hits Different,” she cries over the “artifacts” of their relationship and the reminiscences she has of them collectively. She particularly calls out “your hair,” which can be telling since she additionally makes references to Alwyn’s hair in “Gorgeous” and “Gold Rush.” She additionally calls herself an “argumentative antithetical dream girl,” which conjures the arguing she sings about in “Gold Rush.”

However, after all, the track may very well be a couple of relationship Swift has by no means been public about. Plus, some followers have theorized that it is truly a couple of fictional relationship. Again when “Lover” was launched in 2019, Swift stated that “Death by a Thousand Cuts” was impressed by the Netflix rom-com “Someone Great.” The film (and the breakup at its heart) impressed Swift so deeply, she informed Elvis Duran’s radio present in 2019, that, “For about a week, I start waking up from dreams that I’m living out that scenario, that that’s happening to me,” per Decider. Now, since “Midnights” is about ideas Swift had in the midst of the night time, may “Hits Different” be a second tackle the sentiments “Someone Great” introduced up for her? It is positively potential.

Swifties must wait and see if she sheds extra mild on the monitor, which may occur if she performs it dwell once more.