Get the latest gossip

Breakups, fantasies and her most cutting lyrics: inside Taylor’s Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department

What are the big takeaways from Swift’s new album? She’s refining her sound, confronting elements of her fanbase and done with romantic idealisation

feels like a deservedly bitter, barbed update of the cutesier and more cloying Anti-Hero that suggests Swift is the way she is because of the twisted culture she grew up in and had to contort herself to fit into: “You taught me, you caged me, and then you called me crazy,” she seethes, sounding quite high on the fearsome power commentators have ascribed to her. She was fresh out of a six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn; Healy was in trouble for laughing at racist jokes on a podcast, an incident that led concerned Swift fans to dig up his previous controversies and pen (pathetic) open letters petitioning her to break up with him. !, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me and I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) make a great, subtle virtue of the southern gothic melodrama Swift tried out on Evermore’s shlocky No Body, No Crime; while the only supersized pop moment is I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, which blows dazzling arpeggiated synths worthy of Robyn or the Pet Shop Boys stadium-wards.

Get the Android app