Patient Zero

'Patient Zero' is a pop song^[3] by Taylor Swift, released on 25 September 2026.^[1] It is the first of the four new songs on 'The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore', the expanded edition of her twelfth studio album, and runs 3 minutes 46 seconds.^[1][3] Swift wrote and produced it with Max Martin and Shellback.^[1] She announced it on 22 September, with a 24-hour CD pre-order on her website in original, acoustic and piano versions.^[4]

What it is about

Swift traced the song to an evening with friends. One of them said the new girlfriend of a former boyfriend had contacted her to ask whether she had been through the same things with him, and the others in the group said they had received calls like that too.^[7] Swift has not named anyone as the subject.^[7] In medicine, patient zero is the first known case in an outbreak. The term itself began as a misreading: in a 1984 report on early AIDS cases in the United States, one man was labelled patient O, for outside California, and readers took the letter for a zero.^[8] mymy looked at that history in its report on the announcement.^[13]

Music video

Swift directed the video and Emmanuel Lubezki was its cinematographer.^[6] In it Dakota Johnson plays the new girlfriend of a man played by Colin Farrell, Swift plays his former partner, and Cara Delevingne also appears.^[10] It premiered on 27 September 2026 during the MTV Video Music Awards broadcast and was published on her YouTube channel on 29 September.^[9][6] A lyric video had gone up on the channel on 26 September, at the same moment as one for 'Cleveland!'; six and a half hours later mymy counted 407,280 views for 'Patient Zero' and 582,681 for 'Cleveland!'.^[12]

Charts

'Patient Zero' entered Spotify's global daily chart at No. 1 on 25 September 2026 with 13,709,109 streams, and was No. 1 in the United States the same day.^[5] Spotify said no song by a female artist had drawn more streams in one day on the service so far that year.^[11] The song slipped to No. 2 globally on 26 and 27 September, then was back at No. 1 from 28 to 30 September.^[5]