![]() ![]() But shocking people with harsher language and a love for Gone Girl does not replace good songwriting. Here, Swift lets curse words and references to drugs do the heavy lifting for her. The song recalls similar vocal distortion heard on parts of Reputation, but doesn’t have their ambitious production value. “Draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man,” Swift says, opening a tepid song about silent revenge with meme speak straight from Tumblr. ![]() “Vigilante Shit” pours a bucket of 2014-era, Blair Waldorf bad-girl attitude all over the album. Things, unfortunately, start to go downhill from there. How perfect of a picture is, “I have this dream my daughter-in-law kills me for the money, she thinks I left them in the will/The family gathers ’round and reads it and then someone screams out/‘She’s laughing up at us from Hell!’”? And when she’s not drawing out a chuckle, she’s getting full-on laughs. ![]() It’s so wild and silly that you just have no choice but to respect it-the kind of thing that fans will scream in arenas and secret listeners will smirk at, alone in their cars with no one around to see. It’s the perfect mixture of wit and emotion, with truly laugh-out-loud lyrics like, “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby/And I’m a monster on the hill.” It’s sublime, a clever yet melancholic rumination on Swift’s own status as a polarizing figure and her worry that it will eventually drive everyone away. It’s pure Swiftian pop, with some welcome production flourishes, like a warbling bassline that nicely contrasts against the bombastic chorus.Īlso in the album’s better half is “Anti-Hero,” the first proper single off Midnights, with a music video that was released in the wee hours of the morning. The song, named after an old-timey phrase coined for the feeling of falling in love (that, of course, Swift first heard on Mad Men) pairs nicely with the 1970s aesthetic of the album cover and visuals. The Midnights opener, “Lavender Haze,” is an intriguing amalgamation of time periods. Lucky for us all, things start strong and stay that way for a while. The uninspired production and uncharacteristically bland lyricism of Midnights are better left in the pages of a journal or lost in the shadow of a dream. The result is an atypical step backward, a record half-finished. But on Midnights, Swift is “out of the folklorian woods” (again, her own words) and back to the shiny, synthy poppiness of 2019’s Lover. On folklore and evermore, Swift so deftly melded her own experiences with fictional tales, while still creating affecting music that towered over the listener with irrefutable brilliance. Most things here feel like a first draft there’s a noticeable lack of connection between the emotions she’s feeling and what her audience is capable of absorbing. But the problem with repeating that word over and over is that it’s a constant reminder that, for songs written on or about emotionally fraught, sleepless nights, they lack poignancy and resonance. How appropriate: Midnights, by Swift’s accord, is “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout life.”Īnd in case you forget that the album is about midnights, she’ll remind you-several times throughout its runtime. Instead, she teased out the album’s tracklist in TikTok videos and dropped easter eggs for loyalists to lose sleep over. In the two months after that announcement, fans waited on the eventual release of a lead single that never came. Taylor Swift is all big emotions and breathless declarations the human version of the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach right after sending a risky text.Ĭut to the night of the 2022 VMAs in August, when Swift surprise-announced her new record, Midnights, which was released Friday. Listen more closely, and the enormity of the lyrical worlds that Swift made her signature so long ago still remained. ![]() The songs on those two albums might have seemed smaller and more refined, but it was only because the poppiness that defined her post-2012 albums had been locked away. The world stops whenever her hand grabs the globe. Even the stripped-down, singer/songwriter folk of her pair of pandemic albums, folklore and evermore, was massive in scale Taylor Swift, the most popular artist in the world, had surprise-released two albums within six months. Taylor Swift is a maximalist at heart-she goes for broke every single time and milks everything for all it’s worth. That may seem like a stretch in a world where we have Gagas, Beyoncés, and Madonnas, but it’s true. Believe it or not, Taylor Swift is our most grandiose pop star. ![]()
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