The Tortured Poets Department review – heartbreak inspires fear, anger and a career high

In what some call the Swiftverse and others the Swiftularity, the normal rules of pop stardom don’t apply. Gravity is suspended, time is reversible. Songs from years ago are re-recorded as identikit versions. The wealth of billionaires does not stand in the way of recognizability. And a mediocre record about late nights could become the US best-selling album of 2022 and the second best-selling record of 2023.

Yes, Midnights was a Swiftacular success. But it is not one of Taylor Swift’s best albums. The usual standards of her lyricism had dropped, while her storytelling seemed like a thematic creative writing lesson. Perhaps her work rate of four albums in three years, supplemented by the preparations for what has since become the highest-grossing tour ever, the Eras Tour, had had an effect. For all its commercial and cultural triumph, Midnights indicated possible fallibility. Was this actually Taylor’s noon, the Swiftverse’s maximum point of expansion?

The puffy title of her new album makes us wonder the same thing. The ten predecessors are one-word affairs, with the exception of her debut from 2006 Taylor Swift and 2010s Speak now. Unlike, The department of tortured poets It’s quite a mouthful, and also has the taste of doggerel. It collaborates with her regular co-producer and co-songwriter Jack Antonoff. He is a controversial figure among dissident Swifties, who accuse him of bringing a tasteful but bland electronic sensibility to her music. Another regular production and songwriting foil, Aaron Dessner of indie band The National, is also present.

There are a total of 16 songs and four bonus tracks that appear in other editions of the album. All songwriting and recording appears to have taken place while Swift was on her Eras Tour, which begins its European leg in May. But this time there is no overload. The department of tortured poets has better writing then Midnights and a characteristically attractive turn from Swift at the microphone.

The subject is heartbreak: this is her break-up album. The real background is the end of her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn. That clearly inspired the standout song “So Long, London,” a career highlight. Co-written with Dessner, it begins with a multi-track chorus of Swift singing the song’s title in the style of London’s tinkling bells. She then tells with sadness and coiled anger about the slow death of a love affair in a beautifully cold electronic landscape illuminated by a muted glow.

Her portrait of doomed attachment to a moody, emotionally inexpressive man is the flipside of 2019’s Lover’s “London Boy,” the most enjoyable piece of Londoniana since Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent. The farewell to all that is underlined by songs that self-consciously tilt towards the US. In “Fresh Out the Slammer,” Swift runs “home” to “the one who says I’m the girl of his American Dreams.” “But Daddy I Love Him” ​​is an enjoyably melodramatic tale of small-town romantic scandal, set to back-to-the-source country pop.

The heartbreak continues on “Down Bad,” an irresistibly catchy ballad whose smooth movement belies verses about crying in a gym. “It all comes out teenage titillation,” Swift sings with perfect diction. “Fuck it if I can’t have it.” The register shifts for “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a charmingly cheesy dance-through-the-tears number in which Taylor exalts herself for doing the Eras Tour amid her anxiety. The disconnect inspires a sharp verse: “He said he’d love me all his life / But that life was too short.”

Moments like these will prompt Swiftologists to treat the album as a coded autobiography. Swift’s love of puzzles, her Easter eggs, is further encouragement to do this. But speculating on the subject of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” a quietly venomous piano murder, misses the point. These are examples of role-playing on a well-plotted album from a singer-songwriter whose performances are closer to acting than memoir.

Her singing resembles monologues with impeccably timed shifts in tempo, tone and emphasis. The music is her stage. Dynamic contrasts are rationed more carefully than before, as with the exclamatory bursts of drumming in “Florida!!!,” a spirited link to Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine. Sometimes it gets formulaic – ‘The Alchemy’ is misnamed – but elsewhere the mix of subtly layered textures, swelling melodies and her distinctive voice hits the mark. This is the signature style she has developed, the Swiftularity sound.