Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department is stuck in the past

Taylor Swift has cultivated a daunting amount of lore to sift through. The casual fan doesn’t need to know the entire backstory to enjoy The Tortured Poets Department, the artist’s 11th album, but do casual fans of Taylor Swift even exist anymore? Over the past three years, she’s gone from megafamous to ultrafamous to something we may not even have words for yet, accumulating yet more fans who are here, not just for the music, but for the full Taylor Swift Experience. That includes the romance, the Easter eggs, and how her music connects like red string on an evidence board.

Swift is hardly the only artist whose work is in conversation with itself, nor is she the first to return to ideas on multiple albums. But The Tortured Poets Department exists in the inescapable shadow of the incredible volume of music immediately preceding it. It’s easy, on many tracks, to point to an analog, musically or lyrically, from a previous album. “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?” is this album’s “mad woman”; the reference to CPR on “So Long, London” inevitably recalls “You’re Losing Me.” Perhaps this wouldn’t be a detriment if we had time away from these repetitive themes. But Swift has released eight albums in the last four years, and the influence of that hyperproductivity is evident in Tortured Poets. Production-wise, many of Swift’s collaborations with Jack Antonoff sound like Midnights B-sides, or worse, like 1989 Vault Tracks (essentially, C-sides). Songs that are brand new feel done before within this Taylor Swift Experience context.

TTPD hits the familiar beats of a Taylor Swift album: the wordy, self-written diatribes, the intentionally devastating “track five.” There’s a new kitschy pop anthem (prev.: “Welcome To New York,” “You Need To Calm Down,” “Bejeweled”), “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.” The song stems from Swift’s personal experience of having to take her show on the road while suffering heartbreak, but it’s written and performed almost clinically, designed as a rallying cry for a certain kind of lovelorn girlboss. “Broken Heart” is an unsuspecting thesis statement for the entire album. Swift asserts that she’s a consummate professional “’cause I’m miserable, and nobody even knows.” But you wouldn’t know there’s real pain in her lyrics just by listening to her steady, unflappable voice throughout Tortured Poets. With her re-recordings, there are so many years between the songwriter and the songs that she can no longer access the raw anger, sadness, ecstasy—the truth—in her performance. Yet even in this new music, presumably, created in the throes of heartbreak, Swift is often curiously distant from the emotion she’s singing about.

There are some moments where Swift’s voice brushes up against genuine feeling, like the shaky anger on “So Long, London,” where she admits she’s “pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free,” or her breathless gasp that “old habits die screaming” on “The Black Dog” (one of the collection’s best songs, so Swift relegates it to a bonus track, as is her wont). Similarly, The Tortured Poets Department as a whole glances at greatness without ever fully committing. The ideas animating the album are solid; there’s a delicious tension between Swift’s frustration at always being called “crazy” and the acknowledgment that love does make her feel that way. Some songs come close to shaking Swift out of her placidity, particularly those produced by Aaron Dessner (the big bridge on “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is a good example). Even Antonoff, whose track record of success with Swift is undeniable, occasionally feels fresh here, like with the sultry story “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).”

The album is at its best when things get a little weird or a little loud (or both, on the standout duet “Florida!!!” with Florence and the Machine). It also works when she leans into her sense of humor, taking trite, eye-roll-inducing song titles and flipping them in unexpected ways. “Down Bad” takes on a clever double meaning when Swift is sent crashing back to Earth by an extraterrestrial love; “loml,” a ballad about being led on by someone who said Swift was the love of their life. The title track, too, is funnier than the melodramatic marketing would make it seem. Swift and her lover are not tortured poets, she points out to her cringey but lovable typewriter-wielding sad boy: “We’re modern idiots.”

Encapsulating all of these strengths is “But Daddy, I Love Him,” which carries a faint echo of country Taylor in its delightful grown-up mirror of “Love Story.” This time, the protagonist doesn’t give a fuck about the naysayers who disapprove of her relationship—she’s ready to run away with her bad boy Romeo and chase “wild joy” regardless. It’s one of the album’s many warnings that Swift can’t and won’t live according to what society, or even her fans, want. “I’m having his baby,” she sings, before smirking: “No I’m not, but you should see your faces.”

The Tortured Poets Department is a perfectly good album. Swift rarely makes bad ones; even a record like Lover (at the bottom of my personal album ranking) is notable for taking big swings and trying different sounds. The result is messy, but at least it’s interesting—the same can’t necessarily be said for TTPD. On previous albums, there was an obvious motivating force: wanting to prove she wrote her own music (Speak Now), wanting to try her hand at pop (Red), wanting to be the best at pop (1989), wanting to respond to the haters (Reputation), wanting to start anew after leaving her longtime record label (Lover), wanting to feel relevant while the world was ending (folklore and evermore). Heartbreak is the ostensible motivating factor behind Tortured Poets, but after the unprecedented levels of success and acclaim garnered by re-recording her old albums, she’s left with nothing to prove. Swift said in her documentary Miss Americana that she feels frozen at the age when she got famous. Perhaps her music has frozen as well, stagnating at the peak that brought her an unparalleled fourth Album of the Year Grammy for Midnights. What is she striving for now? Where is the challenge?

For Swift, “phoning it in” is more polished, professional, and engaging than most other musicians could claim, but there’s nevertheless a spark missing from TTPD. Maybe if her latest releases weren’t such a marathon, if her ongoing Eras Tour wasn’t a literal marathon, she would have the energy to push her production in new directions, and more time to evolve how she writes about familiar themes and ideas (star-crossed love, phantom wedding rings, being trapped in a cage—a word used frequently on TTPD). Swift is obviously capable of excellence. If only she had given this album the space to grow, if she’d cultivated and pruned it, this entry could have gone from good to great. If you like Taylor Swift, you’ll like The Tortured Poets Department. If you love Taylor Swift, you might hope for something more.