If the track title “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” doesn’t say all of it, wait till you hear the lyrics.
“Have been you despatched by somebody who wished me lifeless?/Did you sleep with a gun beneath our mattress?/Have been you writing a e-book? Have been you a sleeper cell spy?/In 50 years will all this be declassified?,” Taylor Swift sings on observe 14 from The Tortured Poets Division. “I might’ve died on your sins/As an alternative I simply died inside/And also you deserve jail/However you gained’t get time.”
It’s clear songwriting is Swift’s specialty, and her new album options her excellent storytelling. As she processes a breakup, the lyrics will hit you within the intestine or smack you within the face — typically each on the identical track. As she turns one other web page in her private diary on her eleventh album, Swift bares all of it, and the songs reveal that she has been going by it. She drops f-bombs, sings about crying on a number of tracks and different lyrics level to melancholy (“What if I informed you I’m again?/The hospital was a drag/Worst sleep that I ever had”). On the upbeat pop bop “I Can Do It With a Damaged Coronary heart,” she says it plainly: “I’m so depressed, I act prefer it’s my birthday, each day.” There are additionally a number of tracks the place she’s in a lot ache she compares the struggling to dying.
Taylor Swift
Beth Garrabrant/Republic Data
“Generally I ponder in the event you’re gonna screw this up with me/However you informed Lucy you’d kill your self if I ever go away/And I had mentioned that to Jack about you, so I felt seen,” she sings on the title observe. “Everybody we all know understands why it’s meant to be/’Trigger we’re loopy.”
Tortured Poets (and the growth album The Anthology) is the singer’s first undertaking since her breakup with English actor Joe Alwyn, whom she dated for six years till 2023. Alwyn was additionally her musical collaborator — working as a co-producer and co-writer on Folklore, sharing the 2021 album of the 12 months Grammy with the pop star; he additionally labored on her follow-up undertaking Evermore. “Smallest Man” doesn’t sound like it’s about him (fellow Englishman Matt Healy perhaps?) however many of the album describes the top of their love affair — Swift’s longest relationship — and the songs trace at a attainable engagement and infants, from the country-tinged “However Daddy I Love Him” to the title observe to “loml,” the place she sings: “You shit-talked me underneath the desk/Speaking rings and speaking cradles.”
Taylor Swift
Beth Garrabrant/Republic Data
Among the finest songs is “So Lengthy, London.” Over a gentle, electropop beat, Swift is recovering as she sings about “getting coloration again into my face” and being “pissed off you let me offer you all that youth totally free.” Close to the top of the track, the singer, who’s now relationship NFL star Travis Kelce, proclaims: “So lengthy, London/Had a superb run/A second of heat solar/However I’m not the one.”
“Florida!!!” can be a profitable observe, particularly due to Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine’s eerie and badass verse. Put up Malone can be a spotlight, mixing vocally with Swift on the downbeat observe “Fortnight,” which opens the album.
Sonically, Poets Division feels prefer it pays homage to Swift’s previous work: “However Daddy I Love Him” might simply match on Communicate Now or Fearless; “Fortnight” and different tracks are harking back to Midnights, Swift’s final album; whereas different songs might dwell in her Folkore/Evermore period.
The manufacturing all through the album is mild, and a few extra experimental sounds would have made it higher. However perhaps that was accomplished on function, in order that the robust lyrics might do the entire speaking.