The Tortured Poet’s Department Review
On her 11th studio album, Swift is mostly self-indulgent and uninspired, and occasionally profound.
6.3 / 10
On The Tortured Poet’s Department (2024), Taylor Swift is apparently a newly-converted environmentalist.
Alongside her trusted collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, Swift reuses and recycles, amalgamating the wordiness of Midnights and its sterile synthpop with twangs of the folksy evermore. She dedicates nearly half the album to a one-month situationship, attempts to sound fear-inducing yet again on “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” and largely sticks to familiar territory across 31 tracks, to varying affect.
On the title track, Swift basically samples the opening line of Lana Del Rey’s“Mariners Apartment Complex,” discovers proper nouns in true Phoebe Bridgers fashion (Charlie Puth, Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith, and Lucy Dacus), and fumbles over the wordiest of bridges in a sprawling 5 minutes. Meanwhile, Jack Antonoff marries the synth pads from “Is it Over Now?” with a watered-down Sky Ferreira beat and jangly guitars. It’s unoriginal and self-indulgent, but somehow manages to produce an instant earworm. Elsewhere, Swift and Antonoff skillfully borrow from The Cranberries on the breezy “Guilty as Sin?” and capture the magic of Melodrama during the build of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.”
Yet, more often than not, Antonoff plays it too safe, regurgitating the recent, unremarkable production of “Mastermind,” “Bejeweled,” and “Suburban Legends.” The penultimate “The Alchemy” feels sluggish rather than anthemic; “Down Bad,” despite its radio-friendly appeal, loses steam during its barren bridge. Meanwhile, Taylor doesn’t blink an eye at proofreading lyrics like “sanctimoniously performing soliloquies” or “teenage petulance” while she gloats about her supposedly rebellious relationship with Matt Healy.
Once Antonoff’s recycled 808s and synths conclude, The Anthology version of the album retreats back to the familiar territory of evermore, with sleepy strings, gradual builds, and production from The National’s Aaron Dessner. Taylor’s songwriting is sometimes better with Dessner — there’s a clever plot twist in “Clara Bow,” a starry-eyed musing in the Clairo-reminscent “The Manuscript,” and the best bridge in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.” That’s until she runs out of ideas and brings up the tired topics of Kim Kardashian (“thanK you AImee”) or Travis Kelce. Likewise, Aaron Dessner wearies. He has Taylor do a pretty good Snail Mail impression on “So High School” with its fuzzy guitars once, but otherwise defaults to the same chirping pianos, plucked guitars, and layered background vocals already tiresome on evermore.
As the 23rd track on the album drudges on, while Aaron Dessner plucks the same overworked guitar and Swift goes as far as to venture that she’d rather exist in the “1830s but without all the racists,” you can’t help but wish that Taylor Swift would take a break — a self-imposed quarantine, perhaps — and materialize, when ready, with a body of work that’s worth the folklore.
Essential tracks
“Fortnight (feat. Post Malone),” “The Tortured Poets Department,” “Guilty as Sin?,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” “The Manuscript”
