Arriving amidst a brief hiatus from her 154-show global phenomenon The Eras Tour, Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ annihilated streaming records within a day of release. A whopping thirty-one tracks and two hours in length (including its surprise second half, The Anthology), Tortured Poets lives up to its title in a devastating and at times astonishing fashion. The album has been met with a wildly explosive, polarising reception from fans and critics alike. Listeners cannot help but compare and rank her release against Swift’s existing discography and interpret the album within the parameters of Swift’s ‘eras’ and what they consider a Taylor Swift album *should* sound like.

Arguably, such audience expectations have thoroughly mediated reactions and reviews of the album, at times inhibiting appreciation for this body of work on its own terms. Sonically, Tortured Poets feels a continuation of the synth-dominant Jack Antonoff collaborations of her most recent releases (Midnights, Lover, reputation, 1989). Raw, angry and sprawling, it is tonally dissonant from the elegant, lyrical maturity of folklore and evermore. It deviates from the optimism of Lover, reputation and 1989. As a break-up album, it is more unforgiving than Red or Fearless. Tortured Poets should not be understood as moving forward into a new ‘era’, but looking back, exploring the perils of being a ‘tortured poet’ and the experience of a break-up against stratospheric celebrity status.

Trawling through the past for answers as Swift reflects on not only her own stardom but the broader context of celebrity culture (reflected in “Clara Bow”), the sound and sentiment of this latest release feels as though it is a truthful and genuine representation of the artist’s reflections on how she came to occupy her impossibly demanding position in the popular culture and psyche. In this sense the album both revels in and satirises its artist’s characterisation as such. It’s also possibly the most harrowing album from Swift, engaging in a darker and incredibly vulnerable psychological trajectory through the five stages of grief. This intimacy, whether illusion or reality, is what makes her style and particularly this album so successful. Paralleling the narrative style of ‘folklore’ and ‘evermore’, the singer takes ownership of her turmoil in excruciating fashion, potent in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me.” Recalling and continuing the narratives of “mirrorball” and “Anti-Hero” yet standing apart from the latter two through the unexpected realism of its lyrics, deviating from the cover of fantasies and fairytales as Swift speaks directly to her audience:

“I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me/you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me…”

Deepening the dialogue between herself and the public, I consider this song to be one quintessential to Swift’s discography, with a greater sense of desperation embraced through its more unhinged narrative and vocals.

Indeed, while ex-boyfriends suffer on the receiving end of many of Tortured Poets’ sharp-tongued rebukes, arguably Swift’s prying and obsessive fan base cop the brunt of her scathing. This is pertinent in the wonderfully tongue-in-cheek “But Daddy I Love Him,” a clear triumph of this album with what must now be one of her most iconic lines “I’m having his baby/no, I’m not but you should see your faces”. This could be interpreted as the ‘mature’ version of the Taylor Swift fairytale song alluding to The Little Mermaid in the song’s title, evoking imagery from Fearless’ “Love Story” in references to “running with my dress unbuttoned” and childishly reckless abandon conflicting with parental authority. Mockingly characterising judgemental fans as an overbearing patriarch and conservative community in a jubilantly rebellious bridge bites back at the overwhelming speculation surrounding Swift’s romantic escapades in the most triumphant manner possible:

 “God save the most judgemental creeps/who say they want what’s best for me/sanctimoniously performing soliloquies…”

I find the narrative of the album’s initial 16 songs to be its most powerful asset, nuanced and unexpected as it sprawls forth in a manner akin to a Shakespearean tragedy, propelled by a sense of inevitability. We know the fate of the narrator’s relationship from the mantra of the opening track “Fortnight” – “I love you, it’s ruining my life”. This premise is played with on the eleventh track “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” where the speaker reverts to a moment of denial, with softer instrumentals contributing to a hedonistic tenor threatening to spiral back to the album’s earlier turmoil. The upbeat sound of opening tracks including “Fortnight,” “The Tortured Poets Department,” and “My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys” builds to an uncanny juxtaposition with “Down Bad” – relating the narrator’s spiralling depression against possibly the most danceable backing on the album. This dissipates with gut-wrenching finality in “So Long, London.” My personal favourite from this album, in Swiftie terms could be the ‘magnum opus’ of all track fives, one of the most haunting break-up songs on her discography. Accompanied by a pulsing beat that works overtime before stuttering and fading at the song’s conclusion, and a simple but devastating refrain,

“How much sad did you think I had/ Did you think I had in me?”

There is a conversation to be had regarding whether Swift’s collaboration with Jack Antonoff could be approaching its end, a key criticism of this album being that this heavily synth-based production is becoming tired and repetitive. Antonoff’s style is, however, often critical to maintaining the tone of this album, for instance, the upbeat backings to “Down Bad” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” prevent the album from sliding too far into the depths of its harrowing pain. This latter track is a particular stand-out, wielding irony in astonishing fashion as Swift takes us behind the thousands of videos, livestreams and performances of “The Eras Tour”:

“All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting, "More"/I was grinning like I'm winning, I was hitting my marks/'Cause I can do it with a broken heart (one, two, three, four)...”

Thrusting her listeners behind the curtain while performing the very song on tour constructs such a powerfully twisted metanarrative which epitomises intimacy as both Swift’s greatest strength as an artist, but also her tragic flaw. As encapsulated in this song, the album complicates her existing legacy and relationship to her fanbase - corrosive and obsessive rather than warranting the joyous tribute of Speak Now’s “Long Live,” moving beyond imagery of witchcraft in “mad woman” and “I Did Something Bad” as it realises the uncomfortable reality of psychological turmoil through her characterisation of the music industry as the “asylum where you raised me” in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”. Ultimately, Tortured Poets is a triumphant representation of an artist at the peak of her powers, capable of channelling her unfathomable experiences at the centre of public attention in a manner which is incredibly vulnerable and utterly human.