Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department review – megastar has nothing left to prove

Dramatic, high-profile recent breakups offer plenty of lyrical meat for Swift to sink her teeth into on her 11th album and the highlights are devastating, but ultimately The Tortured Poets Department shows a lack of daring perhaps to be expected of an artist who already has the formula for commercial success honed to a tee.

“Oh for God’s sake, Taylor,” Greg James joked into the Radio 1 mic early on Friday morning. “Ten minutes into the breakfast show, and she’s just released another album. There’s going to be no one listening now.” He was exaggerating, but only slightly. Now at the peak of her imperial phase, no artist other than Taylor Swift can derail a radio show with an album release (in this case, an epic two hour deluxe album), and that’s just one of the bizarre consequences of being the reigning queen of pop. Her ‘Eras’ tour, which involved astonishingly tireless 3 1/2 hour renditions each night, was quite possibly the greatest music show on the planet last year and measurably boosted the local economies of everywhere she visited. A big budget concert film followed, and Swifties ran amok in cinemas the world over chanting away to All Too Well and the dozens of the other storied compositions in Swift’s weighty back catalogue. Today, it’s hard to walk around my local Newcastle without coming face to face with Swift on the side of a double decker bus, promoting the recent Disney Plus release of that film, and European cities are bracing themselves for a hoard of Swifties on this summer’s leg of the Eras tour. All the while she’s been flogging vast quantities of merchandise (branded shorts for £45, anyone?) and benefitting from the re-recording of four previous albums, funneling the money away from controlling record exec and old nemesis Scooter Braun. Unsurprisingly, Swift is now a billionaire, and less an artist, more an unstoppable money-making empire. When Swift releases an album, the entire pop culture media stops to give her their full attention.

Whilst it’s questionable whether all this concentrated media attention is a good thing for music (burgeoning artists and the struggling small venues that facilitate their rise stand to gain little), there’s something inevitably thrilling about listening to such a hotly anticipated album for the first time, heightened by the lack of singles and reported online leak a few days before release day. What’s more, TTPD‘s premise could hardly be juicier – a meticulous autopsy of Swift’s most recent failed relationships, including a fling with sleazy pop villain and frontman of The 1975 Matty Healy in the midst of last year’s world tour. There are several moments in the album where the anger and pain produced by that relationship bubble up to the surface, like on pleasant, country-tinged I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can), which opens with the lines “The smoke cloud billows out his mouth / Like a freight train through a small town” before concluding – unsurprisingly – that she can’t in fact “fix him”. Towering album highlight The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived goes even further in lampooning Healy, swelling with cinematic strings and pounding drums as Swift hits her lyrical stride with one stinging put-down after another. It’s in exhilarating passages of flowing melodies like this one (also found most obviously in All Too Well and in the more lovestruck bridge of Enchanted) that Swift’s genuine genius shows, and her status as megastar starts to make a little more sense.

It’s a shame then that the rest of TTPD sounds so timid in comparison. Opener Fortnight sets the tone with mellow synths and a lackadaisical tempo that suggests no desire to develop from 2022’s mediocre Midnights, and Post Malone’s inconsequential feature sounds almost apologetically small despite all the pretty vocal harmonies. So Long, London similarly wafts in and out like a faint fart, the dull, lullaby-like chorus growing tired by the halfway mark. Guilty as Sin? mercifully throws in a relatively lively drum groove (there’s even a tambourine!) but there’s precious little invention to be found in the songwriting, and Swift has written countless stronger choruses over these well-trodden four chords.

These days there are entire university courses dedicated to the study of Swift’s lyrics, although TTPD offers more than its share of lyrical faux pas that will leave even her most ardent fans struggling to divine any deeper meaning. 2022 hit Anti-Hero featured the eyebrow-raising “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby,” and Swift’s careless baby connotations continue in Florida!!!, where she treats us to “All my friends smell like weed or little babies.” It’s a track that even Florence Welch‘s flowery vocals can’t save. The big percussion in the chorus is admirably bold but heralds a grand chorus that never arrives. Much has already been made of the (scant) references to the tortured poets suggested by the title, but the limp title track ironically includes some of Swift’s biggest head scratchers, including a bizarre line about Charlie Puth and the clunky “You fall asleep like a tattooed Golden Retriever”.

Much riper for analysis is Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? which menacingly depicts Swift’s toxic relationship with the press, a premise she specialised in with 2017’s reputation. It’s also evidence that for all the focus on Swift’s songwriting and penchant for clever “Easter egg” hints to the fans, she is also a tremendous vocalist. I Can Do It With a Broken Heart compellingly paints the moment Swift contemplated performing to an arena post-breakup, although the peppy chorus sounds cheap and hollow compared to any of Carly Rae Jepsen’s camp dance-pop belters (who, I dare say, is the superior popstar).

There’s plenty to discuss in TTPD‘s 16 core tracks – and, make no mistake, many media outlets will cover it all at length for many weeks to come – but ultimately all the hype distracts from what is a rather muted album that refuses to try anything new or particularly interesting. Of course, a lack of experimentation is understandable given Swift’s career is as well-established as it could possibly be, and Swift has wisely guaranteed herself a few hits with this inoffensive hour of pop. But what about those 15 surprise bonus tracks that form the additional “anthology” that had Greg James storming off Radio 1 on Friday morning? I think I’ll leave those for the Swifties, thank you very much.

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