Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album “The Tortured Poets Department” has proved to be one of her most polarizing releases to date.
The standard edition is a 16-song voyage through Swift’s inner turmoil; major themes include imprisonment, delusion, and, of course, heartbreak.
Shortly after it was released last Friday, Swift unveiled “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology,” transforming the album into a sprawling two-hour epic (though most reviewers only focused on the original tracklist).
All 31 songs were written or cowritten by Swift and coproduced with Jack Antonoff or Aaron Dessner (or both), her go-to collaborators since 2020. Others include two high-profile features from Post Malone (“Fortnight”) and Florence + The Machine (“Florida!!!”).
Reviews for “The Tortured Poets Department” have been rolling in for days. Here’s what critics have said so far.
“Swift has written plenty of songs that revel in post-breakup hurt across her catalog, but ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ is both more mature — the teen slings and arrows naturally evolving into adult entanglements and emotional affairs — and more pissed-off, with unbridled emotion and unkempt drama often taking center stage.” — Jason Lipshutz, Billboard
“As breakup albums go, it’s a doozy, as they would have said back in Clara Bow’s day — an unapologetically dramatic (if often witty) record that will be soundtracking untold millions of tragic rifts to come. If you’ve been putting one off, now might not be a bad time to schedule it.” — Chris Willman, Variety
“The LP turns out to be something of a heel turn; it’s got a proudly villainous energy as Swift embraces her messiest and most chaotic tendencies.” — Mikael Wood, The Los Angeles Times
“When on this album’s title track, Swift sings, ‘I think some things I never say,’ she’s making an offhand joke; but this is the album where she does say all the things she thinks, about love at least, going deeper into the personal zone that is her métier than ever before.
“Sharing her darkest impulses and most mortifying delusions, she fills in the blank spaces in the story of several much-mediated affairs and declares this an act of liberation that has changed and ultimately strengthened her. She spares no one, including herself.” — Ann Powers, NPR
“So many of these songs are adult Taylor, single again, revisiting the kind of zero-to-60 romantic crash-and-burns she used to cram into a weekend, back in her early albums, but from a new perspective. So there’s a dialogue between her teen and adult selves.” — Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone
“There’s no hierarchy of tragic detail; these songs fail to distill an overarching emotional truth, tending to smother rather than sting. It would help if Swift were exploring new musical ideas, but she is largely retreading old territory — unsurprising, perhaps, given that the last three years of her life have been consumed by re-recording her old albums and touring her past selves.” — Olivia Horn, Pitchfork
“Swift portrays herself as a woman stuck in a spiral of obsessive overthinking, with new cuts seeming to open up old wounds. The pain seems realer now, more lived in, but the imagery she uses to describe it is the same as it was when she was 16.
“My hope is that this album is catharsis for her: the purging not just of an emotional moment in time but also of a preoccupation with the motifs that are holding her back.” — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“She has now reached a level of virtuosity within her genre that feels nearly immutable — she’s too practiced, too masterly, to swing and really miss. But ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ suffers from being too long (two hours after it was released, Swift announced a second disk, bringing the total number of tracks to 31) and too familiar.” — Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker
“This record is not a work of unimpeachable genius, nor does it feel engineered into existence by a committee of monied interests — it’s way too long and uneven to be, from any point of view, savvy … She’s just processing a weird chapter of her life.” — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic
“I like Taylor Swift bonus tracks, but I’ve gotten a lot of them over the past few years, and she has just dropped another 31 of them — a same-sounding chunk that lasts for more than two hours and almost never cranks the energy-level up. It’s excessive.” — Tom Breihan, Stereogum
“Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match. — Lindsay Zoladz, The New York Times
“‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ a 31-song anthology on which Antonoff shaped 16 songs, hovers in a homogenized comfort zone of hollowed-out percussion and piano chord progressions that never reach the peak they’re building toward. In their sonic monotony, these records also sound like new versions of old albums. At a certain point, it begins to feel as though Swift and Antonoff are simply going through the motions while running in place.” — Larisha Paul, Rolling Stone
“It mostly descends into a monochromatic palette, existing in the same Jack Antonoff-branded synth pop as ‘Midnights,’ yet struggling to capture any of its brightness.” — Laura Molloy, NME
“[Antonoff] has become her most consistent collaborator. There is a sonic uniformity to much of ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ however — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato — that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.” — Lindsay Zoladz, The New York Times
“Synths flutter, an electro-pop beat pulses and the melody is structured as one of Swift’s trademark glistening pop gems. But then the lyrics of ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’ kick in and Swift travels through the most potent psychological exploration of ‘the show must go on’ since Smokey Robinson and The Miracles described ‘The Tears of a Clown’ in 1967.” — Melissa Ruggieri, USA Today
“The song that feels the most revelatory is ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,’ which tears down the curtain to reveal the truth behind it, scored to a frantic, pulsating, almost obscenely jaunty beat.” — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“Sure to be one of the most talked-about and replayed tracks, ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’ has a touch of a Robyn-style dancing-through-tears ethos to it.” — Chris Willman, Variety
“These are the makings of a very sad song, but ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’ isn’t sad at all; it’s crisp, propulsive, almost ecstatic.” — Mikael Wood, The Los Angeles Times
“There are a lot of soft rock and alt-rock sounds on ‘TTPD,’ especially in the latter half, and in some of the double album ‘Anthology’ songs; there’s a future lane for her there, combining subtle country and rock ‘n roll with slide guitars and a more ambient sense of space.” — P. Claire Dodson, Teen Vogue
“[‘But Daddy I Love Him’] is brilliant, a breathtaking deflection in a country song that jabs the listener with the old TayTay sound and then seethes in perfect elocution as it builds toward the hushed assertiveness of a guest of honor inviting you to leave a soirée.” — Craig Jenkins, Vulture
“The bright moments here work because of feeling, not language. ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ and ‘Guilty as Sin?’ flirt with country and rock, and the combination of live-sounding drums with her keening voice is so perfect that it’s tragic we don’t get more.” — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic
“Sometimes her adult break-up tales are devastating, as in ‘So Long, London’ or ‘Loml.’ Sometimes they’re hilarious, as in ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys’ or ‘Down Bad.’ But they’re usually both.” — Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone
“The biting ‘Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?’ is a spiritual follow-up to the satirical self-analysis of ‘Blank Space,’ while ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ has Taylor trolling her audience by announcing she’s pregnant, no, she’s not, but you should see your faces. She’s dealing with genuine concerns (remember the New Jersey wedding?), but with humor. Sometimes you have to laugh instead of cry.” — Josh Kurp, Uproxx
“Swift turns the camera inward, and [‘Clara Bow’] ends with her singing, ‘You look like Taylor Swift in this light / We’re loving it / You’ve got edge / She never did.’ The album ends there, on what could be read as self-deprecation but stings more like frustrating self-awareness.
“Swift sings about a tortured poet, but she is one, too. And isn’t it great that she’s allowed herself the creative license?” — Maria Sherman, AP News
In my first-listen review, I hailed “The Tortured Poets Department” as the “messiest, horniest, and funniest album” in Swift’s catalog.
Standout tracks like “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” excavate fury and betrayal in a singularly Swiftian way, while sensual country-rock songs “Fresh Out the Slammer” and “Guilty as Sin?” paint Swift and her lover as partners-in-crime, driven to delinquency by the sheer force of their lust. As she foreshadows in the opening track, their fantasy falls to pieces in spectacular fashion.
By the time the standard tracklist ends with “Clara Bow,” Swift is still aggrieved, yet calmer and clear-eyed.
It’s the perfect bridge to “The Anthology,” a collection of grounded, reflective stories that play like the comedown after a manic episode. The album’s true closer, “The Manuscript,” offers an apt summary of the entire torrid affair: “Now and then I reread the manuscript / But the story isn’t mine anymore.”
Please note: In my first-listen review, “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” was rated as “Background music,” while “The Alchemy” was rated as “Worth listening to.” After a week’s worth of spins, these songs have been swapped.
Worth listening to: “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” “Down Bad,” “So Long, London,” “But Daddy, I Love Him,” “Fresh Out the Slammer,” “Florida!!! (featuring Florence + The Machine),” “Guilty as Sin?”, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, “I Can Fix Him (No Really, I Can),” “Loml,” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” “Clara Bow,” “The Black Dog,” “imgonnagetyouback,” “The Albatross,” “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” “How Did It End?”, “So High School,” “I Hate It Here,” “I Look in People’s Windows,” “The Prophecy,” “Cassandra,” “Peter,” “The Bolter,” “The Manuscript”
Background music: “The Alchemy,” “thanK you aIMee,” “Robin”
Press skip: “Fortnight,” “The Tortured Poets Department”
*Final album score based on songs per category (1 point for “Worth listening to,” .5 for “Background music,” 0 for “Press skip”).
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