Whether one is gleefully soaking it in like the sun or sick of hearing about it, I’m sure by now that everyone has heard: Taylor Swift released a new album. While she has been famous for over a decade, it seems that her status has grown exponentially over the last few years. She skyrocketed into hyper-stardom — she was the global top artist on Spotify in 2023, and this new album, The Tortured Poets Department, was streamed over 300 million times within the first 12 hours of its release. She released a surprise double album at 2 a.m., two hours after the original was released, called The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. This deluxe version features 15 extra songs, meaning that Swift released 31 new songs in total. The question is, then, is this all worth the hype?
As a lifelong Swiftie, my answer is an unwavering yes. I listened to this album in awe, gasping at impressive lyrics, freezing up when Swift belted a particularly strong high note, and, of course, being stunned by her bridges. It’s not perfect, and there are some moments I can’t defend — which I’ll get to later — but I honestly believe that The Tortured Poets Department is some of her most brilliant and raw work yet.
The album is as if reputation took a stroll in the woods and met up with folklore and evermore and has sad bangers in songs like “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” and media callouts in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” but it also has gut-wrenching lyricism in songs like “How Did It End?” The entire album encapsulates manic depression — see “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” specifically — and seems to be a look into Swift’s wild life post-breakup with British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom she had been in a six-year relationship.
Swift tackles so much in this album. In “Florida!!!,” which features Florence + The Machine, she seems to spin a metaphor about the end of an intense relationship and a perhaps less-than-desirable rebound, apparent in lines such as “Little did you know your home’s really only / A town you’re just a guest in / So you work your life away just to pay / For a time-share down in Destin.” The town where one realizes they’re only a guest is the failed relationship, the rebound is the time-share in Destin, FL. Not convinced? Swift’s breakup with Alwyn was announced just before her first and only Eras Tour show in Florida. Later in the song, there are the lines “So you pack your life away just to wait out / The shitstorm back in Texas.” Where did Swift go on to play her next tour date after Tampa, FL? Houston. If one takes the time to look, there seems to be a method to her madness.
“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” is a scathing look at the media and how it tends to villainize Swift and women in general. She compares herself to a show animal: “I was tame, I was gentle ’til the circus life made me mean / Don’t you worry folks, we took out all her teeth.” It harkens back to reputation as an album, as well as individual songs like “mad woman” from folklore.
Her lyricism shines through in “How Did It End?” The bridge begins: “Say it once again with feeling / How the death rattle breathing / Silenced as the soul was leaving / The deflation of our dreaming / Leaving me bereft and reeling / My beloved ghost and me.” It rhymes, it’s sonically compelling, and it’s heart-breaking — in my opinion, these lines make one of her most well-written segments yet.
That’s not to say her lyricism is perfect. There are most definitely moments where I found myself scratching my head and saying to myself, “Really?” As much as I like “Florida!!!”, the line “And my friends all smell like weed or little babies” feels too goofy for me. I think I know what she was trying to say — that because she’s in her thirties, everyone she knows is either single and smoking a lot, or they’re having children — but the line is just plain weird. Or in “So High School,” when she exclaims, “Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto,” I cringed. It baffles me that these lines came from the same person who gave us the bridge in “How Did It End?” that I quoted above. This is one area where I wonder if no one tells her not to say certain things just because of her status. As in, her production team totally could have flagged these lines, but it certainly seems as if they did not. She may be incredible, but she is human and occasionally needs someone to tell her not to say certain things.
That brings me to a lyric that I can’t, and won’t, defend. In “I Hate It Here,” Swift tells a story: “My friends used to play a game where / We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists / And getting married off for the highest bid.” Here, she writes off a whole era that harmed entire generations and turns it into a point she makes during a party game. She did not need to say this! She should not have said this! It is insensitive and displays a gross amount of privilege. My only tiny caveat is that I don’t think Swift was trying to come off the way she did; I think sometimes, in some ways, she’s just not always the smartest. If I thought that Swift was actively trying to spew harmful rhetoric, I could not support her at all. But that’s not an excuse, and I recognize that even though hurtful intent may not have been there, impact certainly is. While I love Swift’s music in general, I am one of the first to admit that she is flawed.
In general, this is an album that is not designed to be introductory to Swift’s discography. Rather, it is meant for established, dedicated fans who understand the parallels she makes to prior songs, the references to certain life events, etc. It is rife with imagery that takes on a new life when given the correct context. If one is thinking of just beginning to get into Taylor Swift, they should not start here. But for those of us who know and love her, this album is a gift. In The Tortured Poets Department, Swift weaves complicated stories through powerful singing. She captures the nuances of her relationships romantically, with the media, with her fans, and with herself. It seems that she’s touched the lives of millions all over, creating an album that will surely go down in history.
Established 1874.
