In the week that Courtney Love called Taylor Swift “not important” (“She might be a safe space for girls,” Love said, “but she’s not interesting as an artist”) comes The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th album, a self-defence against such critiques. Released alongside monochrome social media posts containing typewritten lyric fragments, this record deliberately positions Swift not as the billion-dollar global pop star of the Eras tour, still making its way around the globe to the UK, but Taylor Swift the prolific songwriter, Taylor Swift the sensitive artiste, Taylor Swift the tortured poet.
If this is a poem, it’s an epic – the album proper contains 16 songs, with an extra 15 released shortly after on The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. And she certainly sounds tortured. This is an armoured, resentful record, and Swift portrays herself as a woman battered and bruised – tormented by her exes, her haters, and even, at times, her fans. (In this, it is a less camp, less bombastic and altogether sadder version of her sixth album, Reputation, though it sonically more reminiscent of 1989 and Midnights.) “All my mornings are Monday/Stuck in an endless February,” Swift drawls on the echoing opener, “Fortnight”, “I took the miracle move-on drug/The effects were temporary”. This is her first “break-up album” in a decade (it comes after the end of Swift’s six-year-long relationship with the British actor Joe Alwyn and a brief but much-publicised, controversy-courting love affair with the 1975’s frontman, Matty Healy), and it contains plenty of satisfyingly cutting lyrics, full of her characteristic defensive vulnerability. But they are delivered in a deadpan, conversational vocal in her lower register, full of run-on lines on songs co-written by Aaron Dessner; or set to a subdued musical backdrop of ambient Jack Antonoff-produced synths and mid-tempo percussion. There are references to white wine, alcoholism, narcotics, depression, heroin, and that miracle move-on drug: on The Tortured Poets Department, feelings of rage, sadness and freedom are all slightly sedated.
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