For the most part,
Taylor Swift's various eras have been distinctive and well-defined. There were her country beginnings, a crossover to both sharp pop and global superstardom, the era of cozy indie folk she briefly detoured into with the 2020 albums
Folklore and
Evermore, and a deeper embrace of throwback synth pop on 2022's
Midnights, to name just a few. The era presented in
Swift's 11th studio album,
The Tortured Poets Department, is harder to pin down. Produced with long-time collaborators
Jack Antonoff and
the National's
Aaron Dessner, the album pulls from
Swift's previous phases rather than introducing any new overarching identity or sound, with songs loosely connected by scenes from a bitter, messy breakup. While heavy-handed poetics are ostensibly part of the core concept, seething breakup songs are nothing new for
Swift, and the lack of a solid stylistic or narrative through-line makes the album feel like an incoherent vision board of every idea she had during the songwriting process. There's more
Midnights-esque neon pop on tracks like ¿Down Bad¿ and ¿Florida!!!¿ (the latter a duet with
Florence + the Machine), aching quasi-folk balladry on ¿loml,¿ and inclusions like ¿Guilty as Sin?¿ or ¿Clara Bow,¿ which sound like they could be outtakes from
1989,
Lover, or any post-2012 point in
Swift's discography.
Antonoff's production and
Swift's affected vocal phrasing repeatedly recall
Lana Del Rey on moody tracks like ¿Fresh Out the Slammer¿ (which incorporates an interesting beat switch near the end) and ¿My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,¿ but
Swift largely falls back on old songwriting tricks rather than fully inhabiting this style or making it her own.
The Tortured Poets Department is tedious. Never mind the surprise-release double-album version
The Anthology, which adds 15 extra songs and another hour to the run-time; the standard issue is already made up of 16 tracks that meander as they struggle to make their points. While something like
Swift's extended, ten-minute-long ¿Taylor's Version¿ of
Red standout ¿All Too Well¿ could maintain an emotional intensity that warranted its epic length, tunes like the flailing and confusing ¿But Daddy I Love Him¿ and the slogging ¿Who's Afraid of Little Old Me¿ simply overstay their welcome. For a songwriter responsible for some of the biggest choruses and best-selling melodies of her generation, there's a surprising lack of immediacy or even cheap, sure-thing pop hooks here. Songs like ¿Fortnight¿ (which is weighed down by a mushy
Post Malone feature) and the tepid title track aim for the kind of memorable earworms
Swift has created better than most, but they fall short. All of these various missteps culminate in an album that feels like a missed opportunity. While the feelings here are melodramatic and overexpressed, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness, so is some of
Swift's best work, but with far more interesting results. A better-organized, more thoughtfully edited version of the album, one that turned the best songs over a few more times until some hit-worthy elements emerged, could have taken
Swift into a whole new era. ~ Fred Thomas
