What Is Taylor Swift (and the Snake She Just Tweeted) Trying to Tell Us?

What is Taylor Swift trying to tell us? After appearing to wipe her social media accounts clean late last weeks—deleting the avatar photo and header on both her Facebook and Twitter accounts, and emptying out her Instagram—the pop star sparked rumors ranging from a possible hacking to a career change (could it be coincidence that Steve Bannon left his post on the same day?), to an upcoming album launch.

The singer has kept a relatively low profile as of late, attempting to keep her romance with Joe Alwyn out of the public eye and largely staying out of the news—save for a January single release with Zayn Malik and her recent testimony in which she and her legal team thoroughly trounced a radio DJ who allegedly groped her at a meet-and-greet in 2013.

Today, Swift broke her social media silence, tweeting what appeared to be a CGI snake uncoiling in the darkness, in what was immediately interpreted as a one-two punch: both a hint at her forthcoming album (the hashtag #T6IsComing almost immediately began trending and some particularly avid fans found a previously unknown song, “Timeless,” newly registered under Swift’s name) and a jab at some of her most outspoken critics. It was only July of last year that the singer found herself ensnared in a now-infamous feud with Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, over the former’s use of Swift in a song lyric, which Swift denied approving (but Kardashian West caught on tape). Swift was accused of treachery, and her social media was overrun with snake imagery. As Wired reported last week, Instagram’s Kevin Systrom has tried to clear up the issue, returning Swift’s (pre-deleted) feed to the idyll it was before it became something “like the Reptile Discovery Center at the National Zoo” and her posts “followed almost entirely by snake emoji: snakes piled on snakes, snakes arranged numerically, snakes alternating with pigs.”

We will have to wait and see whether or not that experience in the Internet trenches gave Swift enough inspiration for some biting lyrics, but in the meantime, Internet theories abound, including that she may plan to drop her album during today’s much-hyped solar eclipse. Swift’s frequent music video collaborator Joseph Kahn teased as much in a tweet:

Some of the best Internet reactions below.

Taylor Swift Talks Googling Herself, Which Celebrity’s Closet She’d Raid, and the Bravest Thing She’s Ever Done