Taylor Swift’s “august” appears on the 2020 studio album Folklore. The album was Swift’s eighth studio record and was released on July 24, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Folklore marked a major change in Swift’s presentation. Instead of centering the album on autobiographical pop narratives, she emphasized fictional characters, imagined histories, and atmospheric storytelling. “august” belongs to that fictional world and is narrated by a character involved in a teenage summer romance.
The album’s surprise release helped make its arrival especially notable. Swift announced Folklore on social media only hours before it became available, departing from the long promotional campaigns associated with many of her earlier albums. The song’s recurring August streams later made it one of the record’s most recognizable seasonal tracks.