From its very public conception, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) was an incredulous embarrassment. Following Midnights' album of the year win, Taylor Swift subsequently announced TTPD’s impending release date at the Grammys, eclipsing Annie Lennox's performance calling for a ceasefire in Gaza directly after.

The incredulity of the announcement was underscored by the echoing question of “How?” Taylor Swift’s schedule is stacked. How did she manage to find time to write and record an entire album while jetpacking around the world for the extravagant Eras Tour, re-recording her old projects, and perfecting an all-American PR relationship?

Upon first listening to The Tortured Poets Department, I had my answer: by settling for mediocrity.

Although, even mediocrity is flattering. Instead of a review, I am tempted to simply list some of the lyrics that appear on this album:

“Now I’m down bad, crying at the gym.” (Written and sung by a 34-year-old woman).

“My friends all smell like weed or little babies.” (I’m still not sure what this really means).

“He jokes that it’s heroin, but this time with an ‘e’.” (Alexa, play ‘Colors’ by Halsey).

“You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate. We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” (...Okay).

Swift’s thematic intentions for TTPD, as revealed in an iHeartRadio interview, remain particularly Swiftian and relatable: “fatalism, longing, pining away, lost dreams”. In fact, the appeal of Swift’s songwriting, and the very crux of her branding, is relatability. In the album booklet for her 2014 phenomenon 1989, Swift famously instructed listeners, “These songs were once about my life. They are now about yours”. But in TTPD, as Swift reduces these universal, big themes into unrefined moments in her own life, the primary appeal of her songwriting is lost.

Swift tries to toe the line between cheeky, modern references and poetic, timeless songwriting, but falls flat on her face. Rather than settling for punchy, concise lines, Swift lauds every lyric with awkward over-explanation, until it's soulless, meaningless and wrought with insecurity. It’s the sort of clumsy, endearing wordiness which worked on Speak Now in 2010, when she was a smart, sensitive teenager trying to prove herself as a serious songwriter—but now just reads like an embarrassing classic case of Big Artist, No Editor.

The No Editor stink bleeds into the production. TTPD’s sound is crafted by familiar hands: TTPD's sound is crafted by familiar hands: Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. Dessner's discography includes the likes of Folklore, Evermore and Midnights, and Antonoff's production stretching back to Reputation and Lover.  Taylor Swift is by no means challenging her usual sound: as a whole, the album is still in the same synth-pop register as Midnights, with a few bombastic, catchy moments. The fleeting moments in which the production dares to dip into something experimental are the highest of highs on the album. ‘Florida!!!’ featuring Florence Welch is a soaring ensemble of layered vocals, stray jazzy instrumentals, and a flashy, ear-worm beat. The ghostly, tensioned rhythms of ‘So Long London’ are perfectly melancholic.

In ‘Dream of Antonification: Pop Music’s Blandest Prophet’, Mitch Therieau characterises Jack Antonoff’s music production as a “hollow, cinematic bigness… a catharsis machine”, as Antonoff “reduce(s) (songs) down to a mechanism for delivering a concentrated shot of big feelings”. In TTPD, Antonoff borderline masturbates the catharsis machine. Antonoff cranks up the brightness and the sweeping shimmer, layering audio fragments and pitched, candied synths over and over each other, until you cannot parse a single thing except a sheer, undefined feeling. ‘Fortnight’, hailed as the representative first single of the album, is the sonic equivalent of a mighty gust of wind. ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’ could be played on repeat as a method of torture.

But Jack Antonoff is too easy a scapegoat. The real crux of the matter can be traced to ‘Clara Bow’, back to the cringiness of the songwriting.  The final track, ‘Clara Bow’ laments the careers of famous starlets (“You look like Clara Bow… You look like Stevie Nicks”) who, like Swift, were once household names, told by Hollywood executives, “You're the real thing” only to be discarded and replaced once a newer, younger version of themselves appeared. Tacked on at the end with a wink, Taylor sings, “You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it, you’ve got the edge she never did.” But this cynical, melancholy perspective on her larger-than-life stardom is confused when TTPD is little else than Swift indulging in her own mythos.

With this one final stroke of her quill (i.e., a final tap on her notes app), Taylor Swift names what she has been doing since the start of the Eras Tour, and self-mythologises. TTPD is but a by-product of Swift eating herself, chipping away into her own narrative until she knows nothing else. In the title track of the album, Swift pens intimate lines hinting at a complex love affair in  “Who else decodes you…”, but hurriedly evades anything too intimate or real, rather feeding fan theories and dating speculation (“like a tattooed golden retriever”, transparently naming Matty Healy as the muse). Swift never pierces the surface, and the track (symbolic of the whole album) becomes superficial and meaningless.

Stuck in a maze with nothing but uninspired, cliched songwriting and yes-men producers, her songwriting becomes elusive and meandering, unable to achieve the catharsis of artistic development. To put it bluntly, at this point, Swift is simply too famous to make good and honest art. Midnights was by all means a sub-par album, and yet, Swift walked home with the Album of the Year medal. TTPD is but a Midnights replica, though now with a gossipy, overarching storyline. There is nothing new. I am sure that it will win many awards, and Swift’s ego will continue being inflated.

But in terms of genuine artistry, Taylor Swift seems fine with coasting on mediocrity.