In what some call the Swiftverse and others the Swiftularity, the normal rules of pop stardom don’t apply. Gravity is suspended, time is reversible. Songs from years ago are re-recorded as identikit versions. Billionaire wealth is no bar to relatability. And a middling record about late nights can become the US’s bestselling album of 2022 and the second-biggest seller of 2023.
Yes, Midnights was a Swiftacular success. But it doesn’t rank among Taylor Swift’s best albums. The usual standards of her lyricism had slipped, while the storytelling smacked of a creative-writing class exercise in thematics. Perhaps her work rate of four albums in three years, compounded by preparations for what has since become the highest grossing tour ever, the Eras Tour, had had an effect. For all its commercial and cultural triumph, Midnights hinted at possible fallibility. Was this actually Taylor’s high noon, the Swiftverse’s maximum point of expansion?
The swollen title of her new album gives leave to wonder the same. Its 10 predecessors are one-word affairs, excepting her 2006 debut Taylor Swift and 2010’s Speak Now. In contrast, The Tortured Poets Department is a mouthful, and one savouring of doggerel at that. It teams her with her regular co-producer and co-songwriter Jack Antonoff. He’s a controversial figure among dissident Swifties, who accuse him of bringing a tasteful but dull electronic sensibility to her music. Another regular production and songwriting foil, Aaron Dessner of indie band The National, also features.
There are 16 songs in total, and four bonus tracks that appear in other editions of the album. All the songwriting and recording appear to have taken place while Swift has been busy with her Eras Tour, which starts its European leg in May. But this time there’s no sense of overload. The Tortured Poets Department has better writing than Midnights and a characteristically appealing turn from Swift at the microphone.
The topic is heartbreak: this is her break-up album. The real-life backdrop is the end of her six-year relationship with the British actor Joe Alwyn. That has clearly inspired the standout track “So Long, London”, a career highlight. Co-written with Dessner, it opens with a multi-tracked choir of Swift singing the song’s title in the style of the ringing bells of London. Then she recounts, with sorrow and coiled anger, the slow death of a love affair in a beautifully chilly electronic landscape lit by a muted glow.
Her portrait of doomed attachment to a moody, emotionally inexpressive man is the flipside to “London Boy” from 2019’s Lover, the most enjoyably hokey piece of Londoniana since Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent. The farewell to all that is underscored by songs that self-consciously tilt to the US. “Fresh Out the Slammer” has Swift “running home” to “the one who says I’m the girl of his American Dreams”. “But Daddy I Love Him” is an enjoyably melodramatic tale of small-town romantic scandal set to back-to-the-source country-pop.
The heartbreak continues on “Down Bad”, an irresistibly catchy ballad whose smooth glide belies verses about a crying jag in a gym. “Everything comes out teenage petulance”, Swift sings with perfect diction. “Fuck it if I can’t have him.” The register shifts for “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”, a charmingly cheesy dancing-through-the-tears number in which Taylor bigs herself up for doing the Eras Tour amid her anguish. The uncoupling inspires a sharp couplet: “He said he’d love me all his life/But that life was too short.”
Such moments will encourage Swiftologists to treat the album as coded autobiography. Swift’s love of puzzles, her Easter eggs, is further inducement to do so. But speculating about the subject of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”, a quietly venomous piano assassination, misses the point. These are examples of role play in a well-plotted album by a singer-songwriter whose performances are closer to acting than memoir.
Her vocals resemble soliloquies with immaculately timed shifts in pace, tone and emphasis. The music is her stage. Dynamic contrasts are more carefully rationed than they used to be, as with the exclamatory bursts of drumming in “Florida!!!”, a punchy link-up with Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine. It gets formulaic at times — “The Alchemy” is misnamed — but elsewhere the blend of subtly layered textures, swelling melodies and her distinctive voice hits the mark. This is the signature style that she has evolved, the sound of the Swiftularity.
