Across five years of tireless activity, Taylor Swift has repeatedly envisioned herself in the shoes of doomed women in history and literature while coping with stress and public-relations disasters. Her folklore-era studies of tragic characters seemed to wonder whether there’s a Grey Gardens in her own future. Last year’s The Tortured Poets Department, which recounted Swift’s breakups with rocker beau Matty Healy and actor/co-writer Joe Alwyn, bristled at expectations and disappeared into fantasy. She played a gun moll on the run; she was a diabolical mathematician. The pithy “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” suggested she’d rather keep to herself and terrify neighborhood children like To Kill a Mockingbird’s Boo Radley than observe any cookie-cutter standards of living. But lately, she’s been getting her way in a year of overdue resolutions: She bought the masters for her first six albums and bagged a football husband.
Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, however, catches a millennial at the doorstep of traditional adult American family life voicing reservations about taking the plunge into stability. It’s her most combative work since 2017’s Reputation. Instead of focusing on the joys of loving cohabitation and coming across poignantly allergic to controversy, like Miley Cyrus’s Younger Now or the Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco album, Swift has chosen chaos. Still working through residual resentments from last year, her lyrics this cycle often clash with the careful slickness of the production. She wants us to know she’s happy but also hated. Though Showgirl is more streamlined than Poets’s exhaustive sprawl, it’s not entirely free from the frustrating self-aggrandizement of that album’s most headline-grabbing moments of snark. She still feels a bit too in the comments section.
Opener and lead single “The Fate of Ophelia” memorializes Swift’s recent engagement to NFL tight end Trace Kelce in storybook terms. Unlike the legend in Shakespeare’s Hamlet — whose rejection by the Prince of Denmark sparks her unraveling — this fair-haired singing socialite will not be losing the plot. “You saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia,” Swift sings, imagining her predecessor’s death prevented by meeting a Hamlet who cared. In spite of “Ophelia”’s relief at avoiding demise, the album aims to figure out how to maintain Ophelia’s free spirit inside a fulfilling relationship. The practice can take the shape of postcards from quiet couples bliss or passive-aggressive quips about exes, soured business relationships, and industry frenemies.
Showgirl reunites Swift with longtime Swedish production veterans Max Martin and Shellback. This trio hit the jackpot with Red’s “22” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” and a barrel of 1989 bangers including “Style” and “Bad Blood.” The signature sound they established together often favors bite-size chunks of rhythm and melody assembled into LEGO-like forms. Think of the dinky horn-and-drum routine of “Shake It Off” slowly filling up with other tiny noises. Poets sold boatloads like its predecessors, but fans’ excitement for the return of Martin and Shellback says people would love to see the sound of her recent records dialed back to a different frequency. It’s often difficult to gauge displeasure with a catalogue that does so well. But Swift’s work with Jack Antonoff slipped into a too-reliable throwback synth-pop aesthetic that doesn’t feel fresh after years of iterations and imitations. Her folk records with members of the National revealed the narrowness of the default Jack-and-Taylor duh-nuh-nuh-nuh type beat.
But Showgirl does not want the old sound back. Martin and Shellback take a lucrative existing sound and shuck the excesses. Swift promises 12 songs and no secret extras; the credits say the trio connected in Sweden, sometimes as a skeleton crew but often fleshed out by local musicians. A wealth of pop history is on the menu with Martin, producer of Robyn’s “Show Me Love,” in tow. And the album’s sonic, geographic, and historical fixations scour the continent the singer was touring last year while stealing away to record. After the ode to Danish palace intrigue, Showgirl toasts to Italian fishing villages and Greek pop icons.
“Father Figure,” which interpolates the 1990 George Michael hit of the same name, is a clinic in the logic that informs Swift’s writing this cycle. Where the original snuck queer daddy lingo onto pop charts, Swift uses the melody-and-song concept to eviscerate a younger man of less means who saw her as a meal ticket. Resenting his ambition, she offers an emasculating rebuke that suggests she didn’t need a breadwinner, but someone else might’ve lost theirs: “Mistake my kindness for weakness and find your card canceled.” It’s difficult to tell whether she’s dunking on Alwyn, or if the track’s most eye-catching line — “I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger” — is taunting Scooter Braun after Swift won their game of musical chairs for her masters. What stands out about “Father Figure” aside from its placement right after “Opalite,” where Swift celebrates newfound freedom from ghosts of her past, is a sense that love can be a balm or a blade.
Showgirl invokes Reputation in its air of romance under fire, of stolen moments in a season of controversy. The ballad “Eldest Daughter” mirrors the grizzled dedication of “Delicate,” a song about falling in love under a pall of internet disdain. It spends just as much time counting the ways its protagonist has been wronged by traitors as it does proclaiming devotion to the person she trusts. “Eldest Daughter” is one of Swift’s most earnest examinations of her experience being despised, when the fussing internet commenter talk subsides: “Every joke’s just trolling and memes / Sad as it seems, apathy is hot.” The song calls bullshit on not just the bravado of rude anons online but the singer’s own performative bluster: “I’m not a bad bitch / This isn’t savage.” She’s trying not to crowd verses with too many words; Poets’s bookishness sometimes literally manifested in long sentences. She’s giving breathing room to lines we should catch as the 1989 team assists with lean pop curios and brief nods to their respective legacies, Martin’s in ’90s bubblegum and Shellback’s in punk and metal.
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“Did she just say that?” levels are routinely off the charts on Showgirl. The Euro-Motown misfire “Wood” is dedicated to dick jokes that make Rihanna’s “Cockiness” feel edgy: “Forgive me, it sounds cocky / He ah-matized me and opened my eyes / Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was the key that opened my thighs.” Showgirl is contending sometimes awkwardly with recent pop heavyweights: the stylistically slippery and lyrically transgressive Sabrina Carpenter records, the delighted inscrutability of Charli XCX’s Brat, and the alt-rock mojo Olivia Rodrigo amassed on tour with the Breeders and at Lollapalooza with Weezer. The title track invites Carpenter for a former teen-star duet about the grit it takes to become a household name. “Showgirl” makes great use of its guest, even though the production tiptoes too closely to too many mid-tempo pop ballads like Beyoncé’s “Halo” or the Jonas Brothers’ “Cool.”
“Actually Romantic” borrows Rodrigo’s shouty slacker rock to chop at Brat’s “Sympathy is a knife.” There, Charli sang about how her now-husband, George Daniel, assured her that a mutual acquaintance backstage at 1975 shows was not actively trying to make her feel inadequate. “Actually Romantic” schedules its rudest digs early, over muted guitars, so you perk up: “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave / High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me.” Her hater, she continues, is a “toy Chihuahua” barking from a “tiny purse” whose boyfriend must be tired of hearing about Swift all the time. It’s a quirky clapback because a listener could already get that idea from “Sympathy,” which is honest about how Charli’s feelings of insecurity are irrational and selfish, just a cry for attention. Swift now appearing to agree that Charli is small and insignificant is a peculiar play: It validates what was once understood as a nonsensical notion of Taylor Swift as a foil. It also pretends both artists didn’t just vie for the same Album of the Year Grammy in February.
Bandying between songs that revel in a remove from gossip and moments that seem designed to create it — like “CANCELLED!,” which asks an old friend who may or may not be Blake Lively how they’re acclimating to life inside a social-media bonfire — Showgirl captures the peace of being taken off the market but also the illusion of “happily ever after.” You get someone who understands and considers you, as long as you can keep the relationship going and good, and this will not solve all your problems. “Elizabeth Taylor” is a fun conceptual curveball in an album of lovey-dovey songs about Kelce, like the light and sweet late-album gem “Honey.” “Elizabeth Taylor” is another of Showgirl’s jams about not wanting to end up like a historical analog for wealth. The Oscar winner and eight-times-married philanthropist gets invoked both as a cautionary tale and a rubric for life after a happy ending sours. “If you ever leave me high and dry,” Swift sings just before invoking the name of the Cleopatra actress, as if to say that she hopes this marriage lasts forever, but she’ll still be decked in diamonds if it doesn’t.
It’s in the lurid insights into intersections of love, money, and sparingly relinquished control that Showgirl really pops. Like last time, not everything entirely clicks. It’s slick, but there are skips. The pained subtlety of songs like “Ruin the Friendship,” about spiraling after an old crush dies, outshines the beef bait. But flaws and all, it’s better for Showgirl to access the joys and insecurities of Taylor Swift of today — engaged but still up for snarking an ex and his entire friend group, invested in pure pop but not in all the yelling on “Shake It Off” — than live in the past trying to make overly idealistic early-2010s pop happen again.
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