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Updated: April 29, 2024 @ 6:57 am
Coming off of one of the best years ever seen in the music industry, including a record-breaking tour and a Time’s Person of the Year win, Taylor Swift had a seemingly impossible task to one-up herself with the release of her newest project, “The Tortured Poets Department.”
Coming in at a mammoth 31 songs and over a two-hour runtime if you listen to it in its complete “The Anthology” form, one would think that record would be packed full of powerful tracks diving into the depths of the singer/songwriter’s brain. Instead, what we received is one of the most self-indulgent, creatively bankrupt and genuinely head-scratching releases I have ever seen from an artist of Swift’s stature.
Let me preface this review by saying that I am far from a critic of Swift. I’ve gone on record saying that she is one of the best songwriters of our generation and has put out one of my favorite records of the decade so far with “folklore.”
With that being said, I cannot get over how poor the writing is on “The Tortured Poets Department.” Not only do these songs all sound incredibly similar melodically, they include some of the most confusing and downright cringe-inducing lyrics I have heard in a while.
Lines like, “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle/Touch me while your bros play ‘Grand Theft Auto,’” “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me,” “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist,” “My friends all smell like weed or little babies” and arguably the worst lyric on the record, “You look like Taylor Swift/In this light, we’re loving it” simply plague this record from top to bottom.
While yes, those are one-off lyrics that don’t reflect the entire song or album’s identity, the writing, as a whole, is the worst it’s been at any point in Swift’s career. I think the main problem is that she is trying way too hard to come off as edgy, and it ultimately makes her sound out of touch.
It seems as if Swift is suffering from “smartest man in the room” syndrome throughout the record. Instead of writing from the heart and focusing on the charm that made her past songs and records relatable and endearing, it seems as if she was trying way too hard to think of “deep” lyrics and metaphors. This results in songs that are not, in fact, deep but instead conceptually trite and extremely awkward.
This is incredibly apparent in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” where the aforementioned asylum lyric appears. It feels like Swift is trying so unbearably hard to be edgy and dark on this record that it comes across as simply comical. The track and the record, as a whole, radiates “I’m 14, and this is deep” energy.
Even if you ignore the drop in quality from a lyrical perspective, “The Tortured Poets Department” is undoubtedly the most forgettable album from Swift sonically. Nearly every single song on the album is a sleepy, mid-tempo bore that blends together. While that’s not to say that slow, sparsely produced records cannot be captivating, plenty are, “The Tortured Poets Department” did not have the writing prowess to make up for the lack of interesting production.
I kept waiting for an interesting, or at the very least memorable, production choice throughout the record, but it never came. It truly felt like Swift and producer, Jack Antonoff, simply sleepwalked through this entire album.
Ultimately, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a misfire in every sense of the word. Swift’s lyricism is at an all-time worst, the production is repetitive and uninspired and the two-hour runtime does the record absolutely no favors. While this album is sure to be a success for Swift given the sheer power of her fanbase, I do not see it having the lasting impact of any of her past efforts. 3.5 out of 10.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of The Torch.
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