Taylor Swift released an album of 31 tracks – so frank that it surprised even her fans. This work is a rare failure of the singer. Which, however, no one will notice

One of the main pop singers today – Taylor Swift – has released her eleventh studio album in two parts – “The Tortured Poets Department”. For a full 122 minutes, the singer talks about her traumas, without offering listeners anything new except space for speculation. “Medusa” reveals why Swift’s new album didn’t work.

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Over the past four years, Taylor Swift’s popularity has reached such proportions that it has become simply impossible to ignore her achievements. During this period, the singer recorded four new albumsre-recorded four “stolen”went on a record breaking world tour and independently released a concert film.

By the end of 2023, Swift topped the top musicians on key streaming platforms, and Time magazine named the 34-year-old performer and fourteen-time Grammy winner person of the year and a “source of light” who managed to unite and touch millions of people with her songs around the world. “It seems that right now a breakthrough is happening in my career,” the singer said at the end of 2023. “And for the first time in my life, my psyche is strong enough for me to take advantage of it.”

It seems that Taylor Swift was still disingenuous – her new album “The Tortured Poets Department,” which the performer recorded right during her world tour at the peak of her fame, tells a completely different story.

In just the first ten seconds of the new album, Swift identifies herself “functional alcoholic” and hints that she might end up in a mental institution. Over her nearly twenty-year musical career, America’s darling (about 53% of US adults call themselves her fans) often directly or indirectly shared the most intimate things with listeners – but never in such volumes.

“The Tortured Poets Department” lasts just over two hours – and during this time Swift talks in the smallest and sometimes rather ugly details about her love, which took the form of mania and was accompanied by self-harm. He also talks about trauma, numerous grievances, depression, internal conflicts, difficult relationships with loved ones and the dark sides of his own success. “The Tormented Poet” is the first time Swift has gone over her lovers so mercilessly, familymanagers, media, fans, envious people, ill-wishers, and most importantly, by herself.

The first reaction that “The Tortured Poets Department” evokes in Swift’s longtime fans and attentive listeners is a genuine desire to ask if she’s okay. Moreover, in the video for the first single from the album (the lyrical ballad “Fortnight”, recorded in a duet with Post Malone), Taylor chains himself to a hospital couch, and two doctors (cameo by Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles – they starred together in the film “Society of the Dead” poets” by Pete Weir) treat her with electric shock.

“Fortnight” touches on many cross-cutting themes of the album, in particular, fatalism – melancholy, exhaustion, lost dreams, Swift herself commented on the single:

The singer announced the release of “The Tortured Poets Department” in early February 2024, when she won the Grammy for best album (“Midnights”) for the fourth time. Other musicians present at the ceremony greeted the announcement more than coolly, and some critics said that popular culture is oversaturated with Taylor Swift – she releases too much music and merchandise, and is also constantly in the news.

Two weeks after the Grammys, at a concert in Melbourne, the singer admitted that her future album would be more confessional than ever. Swift invites listeners to perceive “The Tortured Poets Department” as an audio novel about temporary insanity – and it is this that she exposes to the strict judgment of the same “tortured poets” as herself.

Over the course of two hours, the protagonist of The Tortured Poets Department recalls an intense but dead-end romance. There was a place in it for both sincere feelings and emotional violence on the part of an unnamed rebel partner, who awakened the dark sides of her character in the lyrical heroine. If you believe the title track of the album, in fact the couple turned out to be not “new” Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas” but simply “modern idiots.”

This is not the first time the singer has drawn inspiration from literature: Taylor Swift’s mature and perhaps most powerful works “folklore” and “evermore” were written under the great influence of poetry Emily Dickinson. In these intimate albums with poignant ballads about leaving the past, longing for missed opportunities, nostalgia and inner demons, Swift used fictional characters to talk about herself. In “The Tortured Poets Department” she tried to combine lyricism with autobiography, but the fuse only lasted for an hour. In the second half of the new release, Swift returns to fictional characters.

But the usual artistic techniques did not work with the new material. Half of Swift’s new songs lack focus, structure, and novelty—they’re bogged down in verbosity, excessive metaphors, and sometimes reminiscent of rough drafts that haven’t been touched by a literary editor. On previous records, Swift spoke much more subtly and ironically about herself – an unhappy, awkward and incorrigible romantic woman hiding behind a commercially successful brand.

Musically, “The Tortured Poets Department” is also very predictable – the performer openly repackages old arrangements. Potential hit “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” (lines “I“m so depressed, I act like itʼs my birthday every day” And “I cry a lot but I am so productive, it’s an art” as if specially written for a viral trend on TikTok) is similar to “Mastermind” from the album “Midnights”. The intro to the emotional track “So Long, London” literally echoes “My Tears Ricochet” from the “folklore” album. The arrangement and melody of one of the most interesting songs on the album – “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me” – is too reminiscent of “mirrorball” from the same “folklore”. And these are just the most obvious coincidences.

There is a fairly simple explanation for this: in “The Tortured Poets Department” one can hear the influence of the singer’s longtime friends and associates – Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, who again acted as co-authors of the music and producers of the album. If Dessner, as a rule, invites Swift to experiment with indie folk, country and even rock, then Antonoff prefers to work with synthesizers and drum machines. The first five tracks of the album – and almost the entire second part, where Dessner worked with the singer – sound more interesting. The most successful number here is a duet with Florence Welchwhose strong voice, however, overshadows Swift’s.

Clearly, there will be a lot of talk about Taylor Swift’s new album. Her brand has long attracted fans through endless speculation. Dozens of articles and threads on social networks have been written about which of her former partners or enemies this or that poignant ballad is dedicated to. The release of each new album or video literally starts a new cycle of such discussions.

Swift herself does not confirm or refute numerous fan theories, but rather only fuels interest with new hints in the songs. The use of autofiction methods in pop music is one of the reasons for its popularity. At the same time, Swift remains a rather unreliable narrator. For example, in recent years, Swift has consistently flirted with references to queer culture, which will continue to lead the media and fans to speculate about her sexual identity. In the previous album, “Midnights,” Swift dedicated one of the bonus tracks “Hits Different” to a woman, and in the new one, in the song “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” she talks about the bisexuality of one of her unnamed partners.

On the eve of the release of “The Tortured Poets Department,” many Swifties assumedthat its main topic will be the separation from British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom the singer, according to the media, dated for about six years. Some fans even tried to harass Alvin on Instagram even before the album’s release (he ended up using the increased interest in himself to draw attention to the situation in Gaza).

To the surprise of many, most of the songs on the new album reference a brief period in 2023 when Taylor Swift appeared in public with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy. Their relationship caused a lot of controversy among the singer’s fans: Healy repeatedly made racist, anti-Semitic and sexist statements. And at one of the concerts he even showed a Nazi salute. It seems that the song “But Daddy I Love Him” in the new album is precisely about the singer’s disappointment in her fans, who did not accept Healy. Of course, one can only speculate about this endlessly – but this is exactly what Swift is trying to achieve.

The new album will appeal to the singer’s regular listeners, who are accustomed to looking for references, hints and understatements in her songs, but it is unlikely to increase her fan base and collect music awards. As is usually the case with Swift’s new releases, “The Tortured Poets Department” https://twitter.com/Spotify/status/1781444540999831575 streaming service records: on Spotify alone, fans listened to songs from the new album 300 million times on the day of release.

Still, it’s strange that, finding herself at the pinnacle of commercial success and world fame, Swift released such a rough album. Perhaps, having become the main pop singer of the moment, she felt that she had proved everything to everyone – and now she decided to make music only for herself for therapeutic purposes. In this case, it is not very clear why we should listen to her.