Breaking News: Taylor Swift is seen in photos enjoying a tipple on the beach, at Coachella or watching Travis Kelce play – after the famously autobiographical singer describes herself in song as a ‘functioning alcoholic’

We’re used to hearing her sing frankly and openly about her love-life, but it’s Taylor Swift’s relationship with alcohol that has been causing a stir since the release of her new album The Tortured Poets Department last week.

In her latest single, Fortnight, recorded with Post Malone and widely believed to be about her fling with 1975 singer Matty Healy, Swift confesses, ‘I was supposed to be sent away, but they forgot to get me/ I was a functioning alcoholic/ ‘Til nobody noticed my new aesthetic.’

So never mind the hunk on her arm, what about the drink in her hand?

Whether she’s watching NFL tight-end boyfriend Travis Kelce, 34, play his way to the Super Bowl, at home with BFF Brittany Mahomes, out with her glossy posse in New York or at a pop-up bar in Kansas City, Swift has been regularly seen with a chilled beverage in her grasp in recent months.

And while some may be zero proof, Swift, 34, has made plenty of references to alcohol use in her work. In Delicate she says, ‘We can’t make any promises now, can we babe? But you can make me a drink.’ While in Death by a Thousand Cuts, she sings, ‘I get drunk, but it’s not enough.’

And in 2019’s Cruel Summer – supposedly about the early days of her relationship with Joe Alwyn – she sings: ‘I’m drunk in the back of the car/And I cried like a baby comin’ home from the bar/Said ‘I’m fine,’ but it wasn’t true/I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you’

In fact in her last seven albums she has recorded no fewer than 40 songs that mention drinking or being drunk.

But TTPD is the first time she seems to label her drinking as any potential problem.

She said that she quit booze in preparation for her mammoth Eras Tour which saw her train ‘like a frat boy’ in a workout regime that her trainer recently claimed would see most people ‘throw up’. The grueling tour is due to restart in Paris on May 9 after a two-month hiatus, spending most of it with the seeming love of her life Kelce.