Taylor Swift has released her first new music of 2016, unleashing a surprise collaboration with former One Direction member Zayn Malik in the form of a single called ‘I Don’t Wanna Live Forever’, taken from the upcoming Fifty Shades Darker movie soundtrack.

The new track appeared without any fanfare in the U.S. iTunes store just before midnight on Thursday night (December 8th), and within in an hour it had skyrocketed to the top of the iTunes chart.

#idontwannaliveforever

A photo posted by Zayn Malik (@zayn) on

The track, the first to be taken from the soundtrack to the much-anticipated romance fantasy sequel Fifty Shades Darker, which is released in February 2017, is a mid-tempo song that sees Swift and Malik swapping verses.

23 year old Zayn sings in his trademark falsetto: “I don’t want to live forever, ‘cause I don’t want to be living in pain / I don’t want to fit wherever, I just want to keep calling your name / ’Til you come back home.”

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The track is not yet available in other territories outside the United States, and it’s not known when anybody else will be able to get their hands on it, but it surely can’t be very long.

Songwriter Jack Antonoff later tweeted about the song’s origins, saying that he wrote 'I Don't Wanna Live Forever' in collaboration with hip-hop writer Sam Dew. He recorded Swift’s part and produced the track at home, with Malik contributing from Los Angeles, and said that the process “came together very quickly”.

It’s the first new music that 26 year old Swift has released in 2016, a year in which she’s nevertheless been named as the highest-earning musician in the world. She has kept in the headlines after her relationship with Calvin Harris disintegrated to make way for a much-publicised summer romance with English actor Tom Hiddleston, which fizzled out in September.

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