After the mess, the mop-up.
That’s one option to perceive Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” on which music’s greatest star provides up a dozen precision-cut pop songs simply 18 months faraway from final yr’s sprawling and emotionally unstable “The Tortured Poets Department.”
That earlier LP, which contained 16 tracks earlier than Swift expanded it with 15 extra, was maybe probably the most divisive of the singer’s two-decade-long profession; it racked up bonkers gross sales and streaming numbers, after all — at this level, she’s actually too huge to fail — however its combined reception amongst tastemakers and even some followers appeared to rattle Swift, who for all her alertness to the brutality of being a lady within the public eye has turn out to be accustomed to a sure degree of idolatry.
So right here’s “Showgirl,” her twelfth studio LP, for which she stepped away from her longtime inventive accomplice Jack Antonoff to reteam with Max Martin and Shellback, the 2 hit-making Swedish producer-songwriters who helped her transition cleanly from nation to pop within the mid-2010s with blockbuster albums like “Red” and “1989.” Swift has mentioned she made the brand new album whereas roaming round Europe in the summertime of 2024 on her record-obliterating Eras tour, which explains the title even because it begs all types of questions on her psychotic work ethic.
And let’s be clear: These three can craft a hook as neatly and as skillfully — as deviously, actually — as anybody within the enterprise. In distinction with the bleary “Tortured Poets,” which yielded just one pop-radio monster within the Sizzling 100-topping “Fortnight,” “Showgirl” is more likely to spin off a number of, not least the album’s lead single, “The Fate of Ophelia,” which rides an irresistible new wave groove that evokes the veteran hookmeisters of Eurythmics. (Look ’em up, children.)
As a chunk of psychological portraiture, although — the framework, for higher or for worse, by which Swift has educated us to interpret her music — this assortment of expertly tailor-made bops falls properly in need of its predecessor; “Showgirl” appears like a retreat from the vivid bloodletting of “Tortured Poets,” which captured a lady whose one-of-one success had emboldened her to talk sure poisonous truths.
Is that as a result of she’s ended up in a wholesome romantic relationship with Travis Kelce, the NFL star whom she’s engaged to marry? One hates to indulge hoary concepts about happiness being dangerous for songwriters. But there’s no denying that Swift’s lyrics about love right here lack the type of depth she’s mined in tunes thought to have been impressed by the dastardly likes of John Mayer and Matty Healy.
“Please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot,” she sings, by some means, within the electro-trappy “Wish List,” which recounts all of the hoping and dreaming she did earlier than she lastly met Mr. Proper; “Wood,” a type of kiddie-disco quantity that seems like Martin was aiming it for the “Trolls” film franchise, exults within the erotic thrill of a man brandishing “new heights of manhood.” (In case you missed it, I’m sorry to say that’s a reference to Kelce’s podcast, on which Swift not too long ago appeared and dropped a bar about her fiancé — “He may not have read ‘Hamlet,’ but I explained it to him” — that she actually ought to have saved for “The Fate of Ophelia.”)
Elsewhere, she makes acquainted complaints concerning the punishing expertise of movie star, as in “Elizabeth Taylor” — “Oftentimes, it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me” — and “Cancelled!,” which appears like a goth-Nirvana redo of “Look What You Made Me Do,” from 2017’s genuinely startling “Reputation.”
After which there’s the acidic “Actually Romantic,” which appears to be a response to Charli XCX’s “Sympathy Is a Knife,” by which Charli expressed her anxieties about being in comparison with Taylor in a zero-sum pop scene; Swift will get off some humorous strains about chihuahuas and cocaine however completely forgoes the sense of empathy that made her such an icon to each pop songwriter who’s come up behind her.
What’s good on “Showgirl”? “Opalite” is a beautiful soft-rock tune about overcoming previous instincts — “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past / My brother used to call it ‘eating out of the trash’” — whereas “Ruin the Friendship” appears again at a shoulda-woulda high-school dalliance with the pin-prick precision that Swift has at all times mustered when writing about her adolescence. Each songs trip coolly laidback Fleetwood Mac-style grooves that really feel new for Martin and Shellback, who all through the album rely greater than you’d anticipate on dwell instrumentation. (Grasp with “Wish List,” in the event you can, for a killer bass line that exhibits up within the second verse.)
Swift sings greater than as soon as about legacy and inheritance on this album: “Father Figure,” which interpolates George Michael’s late-’80s basic of the identical identify, is narrated by a mentor who’s betrayed by his protégé; the Broadway-ish title monitor, which closes the album with a function from Sabrina Carpenter, tracks the aspirations of a showbiz hopeful from fresh-faced naivete to all-knowing cynicism.
Perhaps these songs are Swift’s approach of telling us that she is aware of “The Life of a Showgirl” isn’t as sharp because it may’ve been. We’ll see if it’s as tidy because it wanted to be.
