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 useless?/Did you sleep with a gun beneath our mattress?/Have been you writing a guide? Have been you a sleeper cell spy?/In 50 years will all this be declassified?,” Taylor Swift sings on monitor 14 from The Tortured Poets Division. “I’d’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 via it. She drops f-bombs, sings about crying on a number of tracks and different lyrics level to despair (“What if I advised 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, day-after-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’m wondering in case you’re gonna screw this up with me/However you advised Lucy you’d kill your self if I ever depart/And I had stated that to Jack about you, so I felt seen,” she sings on the title monitor. “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 challenge 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 challenge Evermore. “Smallest Man” doesn’t sound like it’s about him (fellow Englishman Matt Healy possibly?) however many of the album describes the tip 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 monitor to “loml,” the place she sings: “You shit-talked me underneath the desk/Speaking rings and speaking cradles.”
Taylor Swift
Beth Garrabrant/Republic Data
The most effective 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 free of charge.” Close to the tip of the track, the singer, who’s now courting NFL star Travis Kelce, proclaims: “So lengthy, London/Had an excellent run/A second of heat solar/However I’m not the one.”
“Florida!!!” can also be a profitable monitor, particularly because of Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine’s eerie and badass verse. Put up Malone can also be a spotlight, mixing vocally with Swift on the downbeat monitor “Fortnight,” which opens the album.
Sonically, Poets Division feels prefer it pays homage to Swift’s previous work: “However Daddy I Love Him” may simply match on Communicate Now or Fearless; “Fortnight” and different tracks are paying homage to Midnights, Swift’s final album; whereas different songs may stay in her Folkore/Evermore period.
The manufacturing all through the album is gentle, and a few extra experimental sounds would have made it higher. However possibly that was accomplished on goal, in order that the sturdy lyrics may do all the speaking.