In a time of so many upended certainties, Taylor Swift’s eleventh album arrives as a story very a lot foretold. It’s no style bolt from the blue like Beyoncé’s latest nation album; it delivers not simply what Tayloristas have been speculating about furiously for months, however extra: a shock second album, The Tortured Poets Division: the Anthology, dropped at 2am the night time after the primary album’s launch. When the LP’s title was introduced in February, and the monitor itemizing in March, the query was by no means if, however merely how arduous, Swift’s most up-to-date exes – particularly, British actor Joe Alwyn, but in addition Matt Healy from the 1975 – have been going to be frolicked to dry. As “William Bowery”, Alwyn had songwriter credit on three Swift albums – Folklore (2020), Evermore (2020) and Midnights (2022) – and it’s fairly secure to imagine he’s receiving an amazing most of the demerits right here as Swift gnashes, accuses, mourns, self-flagellates, likens her time with him to a jail (Recent Out the Slammer) and longs to be taken away in a spaceship (Down Unhealthy) and requires an exorcist (the sombre bonus piano ballad, how did it finish?).
Speculating is, after all, all a part of the bundle; a Swiftie-an secure area, you may name it. Her first track broadly understood to be about Alwyn was London Boy (on Lover, 2019). One monitor right here is known as, pointedly, So Lengthy, London; it doesn’t take an extremely stan to learn it as Swift’s Brexit. It solely will get messier from there on in. Healy is probably going the topic of the Smallest Man Alive, most likely the album’s sickest burn, and maybe handful of different caustic putdowns.
Based on some, the album’s title reportedly comes from a WhatsApp group Alwyn was a part of with fellow actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott – a reference, apparently, to characters Alwyn and Mescal have performed in Sally Rooney diversifications (Scott had a job in Rooney director Lenny Abrahamson’s movie Regular Individuals Confessions). The album’s launch date, 19 April, additionally marks the beginning of the American Revolution, when the US break up from the UK.
Swift is clearly sensible sufficient to pillory herself all through as nicely – the billionaire lyric author is, in spite of everything, the precise tortured poet on this relationship – and to dismantle literary expectations. “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith, this ain’t the Chelsea resort,” she tells an unspecified man who has left a typewriter at her house on the title monitor. The bodily album comes bookended by two poems – or, maybe, lyrics with out music. One is by Stevie Nicks, the patron saint of confessional sirens, and one is a self-justifying textual content by Swift that ends “all’s honest in love and poetry” – with poetry pointedly standing in for struggle. “It’s the worst males that I write greatest,” she zings, by means of scant comfort. It’s value noting that Swift is now in a brand new relationship, with American soccer participant Travis Kelce, a pairing which may be the meat of So Excessive Faculty from The Anthology, a monitor that’s virtually indie rock.
Not the whole lot here’s a roman à clef. Just a few songs which will learn like allegorical brief tales – However Daddy I Love Him is an incredible, Springsteen-like mini-epic set in a stultifying small city – nonetheless comprise autobiographical indicators. “I don’t cater to all these vipers wearing empaths’ clothes,” Swift seethes. She is responding maybe, to followers’ parasocial issues about her selection of squire – the type that surrounded her tryst with Healy.
After a pair of lockdown albums – Folklore, Evermore – made with producer Aaron Dessner through which Swift’s music grew to become extra low-key and semi-fictional, and the extra electronic-hued Midnights, made with Jack Antonoff, which additionally retained a pensive mien, Tortured Poets Division finds Swift again on model in varied methods: nailing like to the wall and watching the ooze trickle and dry, usually doing so in a extra emphatic, slightly than a gauzy method. Swift isn’t fairly shouting on the finish of songs as she did some years in the past, however her definiteness, her sturdy outlines, are again. Antonoff is the main collaborator; Dessner’s credit on songs resembling So Lengthy, London come as a shock. The feelings “fuck it” and “fuck ’em” recur.
On Popularity (2017), Swift revelled in loose-cannon mode. Maybe essentially the most excellent monitor right here is the loudest of all. Florida!!! – which deserves its three exclamation marks, rendered aurally as large drums – finds Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine duetting with Swift in a high-stakes tune about going awol within the get together state, escaping their errors – or maybe throwing exes right into a swamp.
Not the whole lot right here is kind of as energetic. The Anthology songs are sadder and quieter. At 17 tracks, not counting bonuses, this division feels a mite overstaffed; at twice the size, that goes double. As with many artists, it’s usually tough so far songs precisely. A few of this heartbreak appears to forged again additional than the six years of Swift’s tenure with Alwyn, describing younger conditions. The piano-led Loml (“love of my life”) seems to be in regards to the one which received away (he’s “the lack of my life”).
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By the top, some may hanker for a track about one thing aside from romantic discontent. Even Swift is aware of we’ve been right here earlier than. “I do know I’m simply repeating myself,” she croons on My Boy Solely Breaks His Favourite Toys, a rueful allegory a couple of doll, toyed with and damaged. Squint, and it’s a standout track that received away from the Barbie soundtrack. Solely a handful of songs break from heartbreak. A tune from The Anthology styled “thanK you aIMee” spells out “Kim”, however Swift’s phrases technically body a teenage tormentor, slightly than newer hostilities with the (then) Kardashian-Wests. Cassandra, one other bonus outing, offers with the distinction between fact and public assumptions.
In the end, this can be Swift’s most Swiftian album: the unhappiness profound, the main points beneficiant, the teachings absorbed. We reward Taylor Swift – one of many giants of widespread track – handsomely to conduct postmortems on her affairs and extract worth: vengeance and knowledge, dopamine hits and succour. The Alchemy is a track about, sure, an outdated love, however Swift makes gold out of processing her romantic travails. She is sitting on a glittering pile of it right here.
