Taylor Swift releases new political anthem 'Only the Young' — listen now

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Taylor Swift is getting political in her new song “Only the Young,” which is out now.

The track — featuring lyrics such as “You did all that you could do / The game was rigged, the ref got tricked / The wrong ones think they’re right / You were outnumbered, this time” — is a political anthem aimed specifically at, you guessed it, America’s youth.

“I wrote it after the midterm elections, when there were so many young people who rallied for their candidate, whether it was a senator or congressman or congresswoman,” Swift recently told Variety of the song’s origins. “It was hard to see so many people feel like they had canvassed and done everything and tried so hard. I saw a lot of young people’s hopes dashed. And I found that to be particularly tragic, because young people are the people who feel the worst effects of gun violence, and student loans and trying to figure out how to start their lives and how to pay their bills, and climate change, and are we going to war — all these horrific situations that we find ourselves facing right now.”

Swift co-produced and co-wrote the track with Joel Little, who recently contributed to four songs on Swift’s seventh studio album, Lover. Fans of Lover will of course know that the song didn’t make it into the album, but it did find a home elsewhere — in the new Netflix documentary about Swift, Miss Americana, which charts, among other things, her decision to finally open up about politics.

The song plays over the end credits of the doc, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 23, and which also hits Netflix on Friday. Listen to “Only the Young” below.

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