Taylor Swift’s music has meant a lot to me in my life. Moments of my teenage years have been textured by her albums, from Speak Now (2010) to Folklore and Evermore (2020); I can almost physically remember, as Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote in her Substack newsletter ‘Notes from the end of summer’, how I felt at the ages of 14 and 21, through her songs. Her lyrics can be so profound that I can almost forgive when her music can feel offensively bad (I’m looking at you Lover (2019) and Midnights (2022)). 

When she first announced her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), at the Grammy’s earlier this year, I, like most people, felt slightly annoyed that she would once again dominate the charts and thus the discourse. But at the same time, I was hopeful. Producing another album so close to Midnights would mean she wouldn’t regurgitate the same predictable (and slightly annoying) pop sound. While TTPD does differ from Midnights (still poppy but in a much more understated way), it is, unfortunately, a worse album. 

TTPD starts with one of the better songs on the album. ‘Fortnight’ featuring Post Malone has some lyrics that are quintessentially Swiftian: “I love you, it’s ruining my life.” However, after this song, and a select few, including ‘Florida!!!’ featuring Florence Welch and ‘Who’s Afraid of Little OId Me’, each song starts to sound the same, lacking a punch or anything distinctive about them. One Twitter user noted that Swift sounds like she’s “doing an impression of herself”, and this is precisely what the album sounds like. When I expressed this sentiment to a friend, she quickly remarked, “Of course it does. All she’s done these last few years is rerecord and rerelease her own music. She’d release new music between those periods and then go on tour to sing those same songs.” Swift hasn’t allowed herself any time or space to change as a musician, and as a result, in TTPD, she sounds like she’s (poorly) parodying herself.

With university courses dedicated to her superstardom and songwriting ability, Swift is known for her lyrical intellectualism. Many expected that TTPD would highlight her skills in songwriting, given all the typewriter imagery used in promoting the album, and to some extent, it does. But it does sometimes feel like Swift name-drops famous poets and writers, like Patti Smith and Stevie Nicks, or locations where famous writers once inhabited, such as the Chelsea Hotel, to feign an intellectual profoundness that the album lacks. How are you talking about Smith in the same song where you declare that “Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist”? It all feels confused, rushed and a bit cringe. 

Being a Swift fan can feel incredibly frustrating because you know she can write and create music that feels profoundly transformative. But her “tireless pursuit of superstardom”, as Laura Molloy writes in her review of the album for NME, “is now plaguing her discography”. As she creates no time for herself to develop as an artist, her art is suffering; and it’s a goddamn shame.