Taylor Swift is one of the biggest pop stars of our generation, and she has millions of fans that analyze her every move. Swift has said countless times that she loves putting Easter eggs, or clues to secret information, in her songs, music videos, outfits, statements in interviews, and social media posts. Because of the countless Easter eggs Swift plants, her fans have created several theories about her. The one with the most evidence involves a lost album Swift may have left unreleased in 2016.

In 2006, Swift dropped her self-titled debut album, a country-pop album that featured her number one hit, “Tim McGraw”. Two years later, in 2008, she released Fearless, with many still-recognizable songs such as “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me”. She continued this two-year pattern with Speak Now in 2010, Red in 2012, and 1989 in 2014.

Swift is known to be a very planned person and usually has songs written for her next album before she’s done releasing her current one. Naturally, fans expected her to release her next album on pace in 2016. However, due to the drama involving Swift and Kanye West that year, she took a break from the public eye. It was in 2017 when she released her album Reputation featuring “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”, a song about West. Fans began to speculate the evidence for the possibility of a lost album.

Swift had begun many of her previous eras with a change in her appearance, especially her hair, and a Vogue photoshoot. In April of 2016, the edition of Vogue featuring Swift sporting her edgy new platinum-blonde bob. A new era had officially begun–one fans supporting the conspiracy theory now refer to as her Karma era.

During her 2016 “73 Questions with Vogue” interview video, when asked what the most important life lesson to learn is, Swift looked directly at the camera without pause and said, “Karma is real.”

Swift seemingly hid many Easter eggs hinting at Karma in her video for the “Look What You Made Me Do” song in the Reputation album. One of the shots shows Swift with a plane that says “TS6”, for her sixth album, in the colors black and orange (the supposed colors of the Karma album). In the video, Swift spray paints the plane with the title of the album, Reputation, which makes it seem like her sixth album was originally supposed to be something else–namely, Karma. The song also featured the lines “The world moves on, another day another drama, drama / But not for me, not for me, all I think about is karma.” Another shot in the song shows Swift in a vault wearing the colors of her potential Karma album. Swift has repeatedly referred to her unreleased music as being “in the vault”–such as “Mr. Perfectly Fine (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)”, a previously unreleased song from Fearless (Taylor’s Version).

In 2019, with the release of her Lover album, Swift continued dropping hints at Karma. In her self-directed video of “The Man”, Swift included a shot of a subway wall covered in graffiti. The graffiti named all of her albums along with the word Karma placed along with the other album titles, which made supporters of the theory go crazy.

Shortly after this, Swift performed at the American Music Awards, surrounding by young dancers that represented her albums. However, viewers were quick to notice that there were eight children around Swift, not seven, yet at this time she’d only released seven albums.

In her evermore album released in 2021, in the song “willow”, Swift included the lyric “I come back stronger than a 90s trend”, which fans believe may reference Karma, as it is believed to have been a 90s rock-inspired album. By this time, Swift’s feud with Scooter Braun had officially led her to start rerecording her albums to have ownership, which may mean that Karma is coming–and it’s coming back stronger than ever.