REVIEW: The Tortured Poets Department
Swift's new double album is alternately frustrating and fascinating - and often both at once
Taylor Swift has made a career being an everywoman; she allows women “to believe that their interior lives matter”, opined Time Magazine when making her 2023’s Person of The Year. That she’s managed to maintain, even strengthen, this reputation while rising to ranks of adoration not seen since the days of Beatlemania is an impressive testament to her skills as a lyricist. Even becoming a billionaire, having the highest-grossing tour of all time, and being the only artist to win four Grammy Album of the Year awards couldn’t put a dent in that reputation. However, the release of her newest album The Tortured Poets Department may have.
By now you’ve almost certainly heard about Taylor Swift’s new album even if you haven’t actually heard it. Maybe you just know it features a line about Charlie Puth and a “tattooed Golden Retriever”, or one about how Taylor Swift would like to live in the 1830s but, she clarifies, “without the racists”
These lyrics don’t become any less clunky upon repeat listens but they do seem less important. Maybe, because, taken in its entirety, The Tortured Poet’s Department plays it so safe that its unexpected failures often feel exciting, even admirable, in comparison to the moments of inoffensive monotony. The first two tracks, “Fortnight” and “The Tortured Poet’s Department” offer a case study in such. The former is devoid of any embarrassing lyrics and contains some genuinely affecting confessions (“I was a functioning alcoholic”), but sounds so stiff and lifeless that it’s hard to feel much of anything listening to it. Over plodding mid-tempo synth-pop, Swift sings should-be arresting lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” while sounding deeply bored.
Taylor Swift’s albums used to meet you where you were - it’s why so many fans claimed such an intimate, even parasocial, relationship with her. But on TTPD, you’re expected to rise to Swift’s level, rather than the other way around.
By comparison, the title track — which contains the seven-bars-of-chocolate-Charlie-Puth-Tattooed-Retriever line — emerges as the album’s best song despite that head-scratching line. Containing the album’s most immediately memorable melody, Swift offers an excellent vignette about a co-dependent relationship (“I chose this cyclone with you"). It contains some of those breezy, incisive lines that Swift usually makes seem effortless. “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots”, she opines, building a rich mythos around a relationship and then deconstructing it immediately afterward.
These are the moments where TTPD excels - where she turns her singular lived experience into relatable, intimate, portraits; be it falling head-over-heels against your better judgment or ignoring a relationship’s nay-sayers despite them probably having a point. On “Guilty as Sin?”, she captures the feeling of becoming too invested in a relationship too quickly, and the heady mixture of excitement and dread this conjures (“If it’s make-believe / Why does it feel like a vow we’ll both uphold”). On “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”, she offers a keen observation that is sure to be among the LP’s most quoted lines: “It wasn’t sexy once it wasn’t forbidden”.
The nature of the album’s title, The Tortured Poet’s Department, meant that the lyrics offered up by Swift were destined to be subject to an extra degree of scrutiny. That and the fact that the largely unarresting soundscapes these lyrics are cloaked in gives you little else to focus on. It’s unfortunate then that we rarely see Swift the lyricist on top form here. A cliched rhyme like “How much sad did you think I had?” would be a hard sell from anyone but it’s a staggering regression from the woman who at 22 years old wrote “Time won't fly, it's like I'm paralyzed by it / I'd like to be my old self again, but I'm still trying to find it”.
Swift’s second surprise album, The Anthology, offers little improvement in this regard. Forget about a line like “Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto” - which at that point in the album feels refreshingly unkempt -, far worse are the moments where Swift feels the need to over-explain even the most straightforward of metaphors. “Push the reset button”, she declares on “The Black Dog” before superfluously clarifying, “We’re becoming something new”. On the next track, she straightforwardly declares, “She’s the albatross” before adding, “She’s here to destroy you.” These are bloated, over-written songs that abandon some of the most basic rules of good lyric writing, like show-don’t-tell.
Taylor Swift’s albums used to meet you where you were - it’s why so many fans claimed such an intimate, even parasocial, relationship with her, even as she enjoyed a lifestyle unimaginable to even the more privileged among us. But on TTPD, you’re expected to rise to Swift’s level, rather than the other way around. You’re expected to still care about her feud with Kim Kardashian (as voiced on “thanK you aIMee”) and be both able and motivated to decode which songs are about Joe Alwyn, which are about Matty Healy, and which concern Travis Kelce.
It’s a big ask for anyone who isn’t a die-hard Swiftie and/or doesn’t have hours to spend combing through stan Twitter and Genius.com annotations. But it’s an even bigger ask because these songs often don’t sound particularly interesting. Never before has Swift released an album of new material that sounds so strikingly similar to that of old. TTPD sounds like a collection of Midnights’ B-sides, while the surprise second album, The Anthology, sounds like a collection of B-sides from the Folklore recordings. There’s a sense that both Swift and her primary collaborators, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, have retreated inside their comfort zones. This should be unsurprising given that recent albums by Antonoff as Bleachers, and Dessner’s with The National, played it similarly safe.
Those who were beginning to tire of constant exposure to Swift’s superstardom have pounced on the palpable sense of disappointment surrounding TTPD and have even gone so far as to describe the album as a hollow disaster, or the beginning of the end for Swift. Such are surely exaggerations - TTPD is a competent, if unelectrifying, set of tunes with a handful of meaningful highlights and no part of it is sufficiently disastrous or offensive to meaningfully dent Swift’s never-ending rise. There are still signs of a generationally talented songwriter (see: second verse of “I Can Fix Him”) and of engaging soundscapes yet to be explored (“So High School”). Taylor Swift thrives when she’s at a crossroads. When the lukewarm critical and commercial success of Reputation and Lover threatened a sudden end to the dominance of one of the 2010’s most inescapable stars (a la post-Witness Katy Perry), Swift responded with a sudden left-turn that resulted in two treasured staples of quarantine music; Folklore and Evermore. When her continued fealty to country music and pared-back singer-songwriter arrangements threatened to limit her longevity in the early 2010s, she executed a masterful heel turn towards capital-P pop music. Hopefully, The Tortured Poet’s Department will lead us somewhere similarly thrilling and unexpected.