Taylor Swift and/or Ice Spice fans in New Jersey were likely feeling they’d amassed some good karma of their own — at least the ones who had made it through the gauntlet to get tickets for Friday’s MetLife Stadium show — as the suddenly dynamic duo gave the audience two doses of “Karma” toward the end of Swift’s long set.
One was in the form of a premiere of the video for the song, which went out to the world not very much later, bowing on various platforms at midnight ET. The other was a first-time live performance of the duet, as the remix’s featured rapper came out on stage to join the headliner for “Karma,” which has ended Swift’s concerts each night since the Eras Tour started in April.
The music video for the collaboration, heavily teased but not announced by Swift until she made it official with the MetLife Stadium crowd Friday night, is filled with digital effects from start to finish and includes plenty of cosmic or celestial imagery. A sort of hellscape is flipped over to reveal Swift as a comically Pollyanna type. Eventually, a foresty mountain-scape is revealed to be Swift as a prone, green giantess, while Ice Spice is both sides now of a heavenly cloud formation.
On stage in East Rutherford, Swift preceded the first public showing of the video with a short speech about hooking up with the hot newcomer. (Watch her introduction, along with the music video itself, below.)
“At the very beginning of the year, when i was just training for this tour… I got reached out to by Ice Spice,” Swift relayed. “She sent a note: ‘If you’d ever like to do a collab, I’d love to.’ What she didn’t know at the time is that when I was streaming for the tour, I was listening to pretty much exclusively just her music… I was getting into the zone to tour because of her. And so I said, ‘Absolutely, when can you do it?’ … And when we went in the studio, I not only fell in love with her but decided she is the entire future… I’ve been around so many artists that are starting out, but I’ve never been around someone that is that prepared and curious and focused on what she wants.”
As far as the video that more recently followed and was held as a secret, under a presumed unimaginable cloud of NDAs, Swift led the audience into the premiere status. “I’ve never done this before, but I was hoping for a couple minutes we could turn this stadium show into a world premiere… I thought, oh, that’s a very big screen; we could just watch it right there.” She added, “This isn’t like a movie premiere where you have to be quiet. I want you to feel your feelings, always.”
The worldwide music video release followed by 24 hours the audio debut of the “Karma” remix. It appears on two new deluxe editions of the “Midnights” album. One is “Midnights (The Til Dawn Edition),” a digital release that came out at midnight Thursday night. The other is “Midnights (The Late Night Edition),” a nearly identical version — except for one very crucial track being switched out — that was released as a CD to merch stands at MetLife Stadium on Friday afternoon, followed by a 24-hour-only digital release beginning Friday night on Swift’s webstore.
Both new deluxe versions of “Midnight” include the original album and the “3 a.m.” bonus tracks from last fall, along with the Ice Spice “Karma” remix and a refreshed version of “Snow on the Beach” that is distinguished by “more Lana Del Rey” than on the original. The difference between them is that the more widely available “Til Dawn” includes the digital bow of “Hits Different,” a song only previously available on the Target exclusive CD for “Midnights.” The “Late Night” edition, meanwhile, includes “You’re Losing Me,” a previously unheard “Vault Track” that set the Swift world on fire when it came out Friday afternoon.
