If you are a Boards of Canada fan, you can never be at peace. The famously secretive, famously cryptive duo are known for teasing new albums and releasing new bits of music through the use of complicated ruses, codes, and alternate reality games and, as such, literally anything they do could be a hint at something. Back in March last year, a bug that surfaced in Spotify caused song names that looked like dates and times to be churned out as different dates and times, which turned the Boards of Canada song 1969 to show up in the player as 1905-05-22. Obviously, I now know it to be a bug, but at the time I assumed this was the start of some elaborate game heralding the release of a new album.
It was not.
I say this to make clear that I am not unfamiliar with the plight currently being experienced by some Taylor Swift fans, who are pretty certain she is counting down to something big via a visual numeric code hidden in her Instagram posts.
YALL, I FIGURED SOMETHING OUT. 7 PALM TREE’S. SITTING ON THE 6th STEP. 5 HOLES IN THE FENCE IN TODAY’S POST. TAYLOR SWIFT IS COUNTING DOWN. pic.twitter.com/43BegbtD1Z
— sami (@sraihane1) February 26, 2019
The use of the number seven here would be significant because, ideally, this is the countdown for the release of Swift’s seventh album, although some believe that the countdown started at eight:
Is @taylorswift13 counting down to new music? 🤔 #TS7
▪️ 8 holes in the couch
▪️ 7 palm trees
▪️ 6 steps up
▪️ 5 fence holes pic.twitter.com/Zy1VnlG32O— Taylor Swift News (@TSwiftNZ) February 26, 2019
Look, obviously, this is hard to judge. You could basically count any object you like in the photo and disregard ones that discredit your theory. It’s flimsy. BUT, at the same time, these three (the couch theory is GARBAGE, sorry) images are in a pretty different style from her usual posts, and the first of them did highlight the seven palm trees with a caption consisting of just seven palm tree emojis.
Is this conclusive evidence? No. God, no. No, not even close. But it’s not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.
I will leave this up to your own good judgment:
