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Taylor Swift Renews Her Vows With Heartbreak in Audacious, Transfixing ‘Tortured Poets Department’: Album Review
Taylor Swift's new album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ is a boldly candid breakup album, with some of her most quotable lyrics ever.
But then, very few of the normal rules of critical engagement apply when we’re dealing with the biggest music star on the planet, whose affections are generally public over time — and who in this case has actually written an epic poem for the album packaging that pretty much renders her romantic history 100% clear. True trouble sets in with the third song, “My Boy Breaks All His Favorite Toys,” with its semi-martial synth-pop, and the discomfiting thought that Swift is basically a busted-up and abandoned Weird Barbie, though she “felt more when we played pretend / Than with all the Kens / Cause he took me out of my box.” Things grow more dire still with “Down Bad,” which has Antonoff reemploying a trick that worked on “Midnights” — a sinuous groove, topped by a kind of of distorted-electronic voice effect as its own instrumental track — but to capture a mood of heartbreak, not the previous album’s faintly blissed-out erotica. The track is presented as a series of seemingly laudatory speeches about starlets — the silent film star Bow, then Stevie Nicks, then herself — where godhood is guaranteed as long as they “promise to be dazzling.” In the final verse, the next woman is assured she’s a lock for the lineage of It Girls: “You look like Taylor Swift / In this light / We’re loving it / You’ve got edge / She never did.”
Or read this on Variety
