A Tortured Retrospective

Reappraising Taylor Swift’s eleventh album, even a year after its release, unlocks frustratingly little.

If there’s one thing Taylor Swift wants you to know on The Tortured Poets Department, it’s that the job of being Taylor Swift is a tough one. Across sixteen songs, she takes a battering ram to shitty men, the media and even her own fans as she writes her way out of the scrutiny she’d been facing for about a year. While she’s been in the public eye for the better part of two decades now, Swift was, at the time of TTPD’s release, enduring the heaviest public bashing since Kimyegate in 2016. To recap: she was on the biggest concert tour of her career (which would become the biggest tour ever, by any artist) and released the tour’s accompanying film; had recently put out rerecorded versions of two of her best albums; became a billionaire (!); broke up with her boyfriend of six years; had a fling with the Internet’s most problematic it-boy; coupled up with an American football player; had explicit AI images of her distributed across the Internet. That last one, in microcosm if not actual significance, perhaps best exemplifies the place Swift occupied in pop culture in April 2024: a woman unfortunately viewed more as a commodity or a force of nature than a human being. Indeed, Swift was her own monoculture, shifting economies and stirring up thinkpieces about everything from fandom and femininity to climate change, terrorism and Ticketmaster.

Swift was at breaking point when TTPD released, and who can blame her? The music – the thing she’d become known for, and the thing that was always her chief passion – was becoming lost in the other conversations people wanted to have about her. Surely, then, a new record (Swift’s eleventh of original material) would help bridge the gap between her creative output and her increasingly massive persona.

I guess? A Swift album is never, at least for this writer, a completely dull experience. (I’m underselling my Swiftie status here, but we’ll get there – I promise.) But the release of TTPD was akin to witnessing a new Marvel film land in cinemas. Listeners – and, it should be noted, critics – were talking as much about the lyrical and melodical compositions as they were the Easter eggs, which boyfriend each song was about. The album was not so much an album as it was a puzzle for listeners to unlock, and theorise different ways of decoding it. The music was overshadowed by its meaning.

The aforementioned Marvel metaphor feels apt; with each album Swift has released, she has added to her own personal lore to the extent that tracing her life – at least, the life she’s depicted in her songs – feels like plotting the development of fictional characters over time. Villains, heroes, allies, betrayals: they all have a place in the Swift Cinematic Universe. As a product of fan service, TTPD is immense, ripe for consumption, like a GMO fruit fresh off the conveyor belt. But, like a certain Marvel film that similarly made a point of catering to its own fans and no-one else, TTPD offers little outside of these exophoric & intertextual references. It all but washes over the casual listener.

When relistening to TTPD for this retrospective, I hadn’t listened to it in full since September – not long after I caught Swift at a London show of her Eras Tour. The impression I’d had of the album, one I’d held since its release day, was that it was one of Swift’s weaker efforts: while not without merit, nor without strong lyrics or even strong songs, the whole thing was more of a personal exorcism than something we, the listener, were meant to listen to. Swift herself referred to the album as her ‘lifeline’ when she wrote it; perhaps it should’ve stayed in the drafts. To elaborate, I was disappointed by the lack of ambition in both the production (which is largely comprised of milquetoast, synth-heavy pop cloaked in reverb) and the songwriting (which, confoundingly, seemed at turns juvenile and at others far too complex). Still, after having spent some time away from TTPD, I went into my relisten a few days ago with an open mind. I’m a Swiftie, and have been for several years – this album was surely made with me in mind, right?

Even with all this thinking time, I found frustratingly little to glean from TTPD. If anything, the things I’ve gained from a relisten have been realisations and observations more than anything to enjoy. One of them: TTPD was made with no-one but Taylor Swift herself in mind, a work of pure self-expression. It’s what makes the album so poetic; for all her co-opting of dark academic and poetry aesthetics (my culture is not your costume, etc), the key to understanding TTPD is as a work of poetry. It’s flawed, unedited, deeply personal (maybe too much for its own good) and sure, tortured, but it ultimately tells a story. Classic poetry. That’s how I process TTPD today; not as a work of art, but more so as a statement of intent, a marker of Swift’s career & place in society on April 19, 2024.

TTPD is, despite what I may think of it, an album, a work of recorded music, so let’s start with the music. I don’t hate it all! ‘loml’ is a lovely, bare ballad stripped of Jack Antonoff’s swervy synths; Swift’s vocals are raw and are given space to breathe on this track, a welcome relief that nonetheless reminds you that many other TTPD songs don’t afford her the same breathing room. ‘So Long, London’ is the record’s most intriguing composition, a sombre four-to-the-floor beat layered with vocal harmonies and anxious arpeggiations that rarely lets up. ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ sonically tears through the fences Swift describes; ‘Guilty as Sin?’ dazzles as it careens through a tryst; ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’ is a death march of a song. These songs have proper builds, take you on proper journeys of sound – something the rest of TTPD’s content fails to do.

Many of these songs are not only melodically incurious (in that they saunter along and don’t adequately weaponise Swift’s unique voice, particularly her lower register) but have some of the least interesting production of any of Swift’s albums. So many of these tracks are washed out forcibly by copious amounts of reverb, to the point that much of their instrumentation – ornate string plucks and (what should be thunderous) drums among them – fade out beneath Jack Antonoff’s trademark synths. Opener and (somehow) lead single ‘Fortnight’ is one of the worst offenders, a befuddling opera where the drums are so low in the mix they threaten to peter out, and the bubbly synths threaten to swallow Swift and guest vocalist Post Malone entirely.

I’d talk less about the synths, but since they’re the defining characteristic of TTPD’s production it’s difficult not to. They breathe jarringly on ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?’, tinkle indelicately across the mix of the title track, smash unsubtly through the portrait crafted by ‘The Alchemy’. Mr. Antonoff, we know you love a guitar; what happened? That’s not to say that every song worked on by Antonoff stumbles. ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’, though far from the best out-and-out pop song Swift has made, at least goes somewhere, building in the verses and exploding in the choruses. Still, it’s telling that the tracks produced by Dessner – ‘So Long, London’, ‘loml’, and ‘Smallest Man’ among them – tend to be stronger than the Antonoff compositions.

That’s not to take away the hard work of Swift herself. While TTPD’s critics, on release, begged Swift to drop Antonoff as producer, I’d argue that Swift is responsible as him for the nothingness of these instrumentals. (After all, it’s her name on the record sleeve.) Instead, I’d propose that Antonoff and Swift have become too close as friends to push each other creatively anymore; Antonoff is still making exciting music, and Swift is still writing good songs – even on this very record. This album, like Midnights before it, is too comfortable existing as a diary that it forgets to exist as a work of music.

Swift performing songs from The Tortured Poets Department on The Eras Tour, 2024

The hit rate on TTPD writing-wise is low. Each otherwise solid piece of music is marred by a weird lyric; ‘Guilty as Sin?’, a curious tale of imagined infidelity, speaks of Swift’s love interest having ‘“Mine” on my upper thigh’. It’s a weak metaphor that tarnishes what’s otherwise the most exciting song on the record. Elsewhere, ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’ is an enthralling evisceration of ostensibly the same man, but its title – plus the bridge that, while magnetic, could’ve been trimmed for impact – strikes childish. Even on more direct, compelling moments like ‘But Daddy I Love Him’, where she outlines a romance with a controversial man, she seems so concerned with defending this romance that she falls short of proper profundity. It comes off as more of a ‘fuck you’ than anything else – or, as, she puts it, ‘you should see your faces’.

By and large, the songwriting is confusing, crass, downright bad, or all of the above. Sometimes her pen is shockingly simple (she rhymes ‘sad’ with ‘bad’ across the verses of ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?’), and other times she gets so deep into her metaphors they just don’t make sense (she sings of a man, his ‘hands so calloused from his pistol’ that ‘softly traces hearts on my face’; a few songs prior, she imagines her detractors ‘sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see’). That’s when she’s not being so millennial with her references, speaking about ‘crashing out’ at one point, and at another naming whole songs about how she’s down bad – but she can fix him! There’s even a few cheap jabs; on ‘The Alchemy’, a paean to her new lover, she strikes down her ex by noting how she’s now ‘a heroine but this time with an ‘E’’ – a tasteless dig at that ex’s documented heroin addiction. It’s so muddled with its approach that it all leaves you wondering: who exactly is Swift trying to pander to other than herself?

Most exemplary of TTPD’s approach to songwriting is, appropriately, its title track. Parts of it are underwritten (‘At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on) and others are bogged down by complexity. (‘I chose this cyclone with you’? Girl, you can’t control the weather!) She references everyone from Patti Smith to Lucy Dacus but doesn’t do anything meaningful with said references, and alludes to the subject’s tattoos so her fans can narrow down their guesses as to which ex this one’s about. The chorus is barely there, a thimble of a hook that dissolves as quickly as it’s sung. The synths are synthing. The drums are distant in the mix. Even the title supposedly references a different ex’s WhatsApp group with fellow pretentious male friends. Yet there’s a nugget of brilliance hidden among the grey mass of song: ‘We’re modern idiots’, Swift muses. She says plainly what she’s been skating around the whole song, and instantly we know exactly the kind of relationship she’s in: self-destructive, pretentious, infatuating, tortured. Then she sings about Charlie Puth and I’m back to being bewildered.

That’s just it: on TTPD, Swift approaches revelation and real epiphany several times, but before she can properly excavate it she’s weighed down by the context surrounding them. She’s too caught up in her own biography to make any properly interesting observations – nothing as profound as Red’s ‘all we are is skin and bone / Trained to get along’ or folklore’s ‘give you the silence that only comes when two people understand each other / Family that I chose, now that I see your brother as my brother’. She gets close, but alas. That’s not to say the lyrics have no intrinsic value, mind you. I know several people – like my friend Iona, who recently published a thoughtful piece on Swift’s song ‘the lakes’ – who resonate deeply with TTPD’s lyrics. And perhaps it's true that I might wring more value from the album once I’ve had a whirlwind romance with a ‘tattooed golden retriever’ type.

But then again, I’ve not necessarily always been drawn to Swift’s music because of its relatability. (A song’s value can’t ever be measured by how much one relates to it – if that were true, Gracie Abrams might’ve by now eclipsed Beyoncé for the most Grammy wins.) Even before my first kiss, I revered Swift’s lyricism and her ability to take specific scenarios and blow them up into universal truths; I’m thinking particularly of ‘Mean’, which drew from a negative experience Swift had with a critic. On that song, she translated her feelings into a more general tale of bullies; here, on TTPD, the magnitude of Swift’s autobiography (or, as we hear it increasingly called, her ‘lore’) outpaces her songwriting ability. She makes no new, original observations – apart from on a couple of songs, like ‘Guilty as Sin?’ and the self-mythologising ‘Clara Bow’ – and one wonders if she really had enough to say to warrant a whole album.

Swift announcing The Tortured Poets Department at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, while winning Best Pop Vocal Album for Midnights

It begs the question: did TTPD need to be released at all? What was the point of all this? Perhaps the album’s sprawling, unedited nature is intentional; it’s long, dense and authentic, promoting relistens as well as social media engagement. If you loved it so much, here’s some merchandise featuring individual lyrics. You get the impression that Swift just fancied a quick buck (though I can’t imagine she was struggling to put food on the table). I haven’t even mentioned the Anthology, a 15-song deluxe extension of TTPD that scans as a data dump of Swift’s Electric Lady Studios file. With this lens, there seems to have been no other purpose other than streams and stats; a move by Swift in June to block Charli xcx’s BRAT from going number-one in the UK demonstrates this to a T.

And, sure, the strategy worked. TTPD was wildly successful, breaking chart and streaming records left, right and centre, cementing Swift as the biggest thing in music this century. But, marketing tactics and release day hype aside, what value does TTPD properly hold? It stands out in Swift’s discography as her most unruly work yet, perhaps the first time she’s released an album because she could and not because she should. Aside from ultra-fans and those who relate to the songs, there’s little to no audience for this music. Compare that with something like Red, a stellar album whose narrative arc about heartbreak fuelled incisive & imaginative songwriting without eclipsing it entirely. On Red, the artistry was the point. On TTPD, it’s the lore.

Trust me, I take no pleasure in dissecting and criticising this record. As a Swiftie circa folklore-era, and someone who’s spent far too much on Swift paraphernalia (looking around my room as I finish this piece, I can see at least two signed Swift CDs, an Eras Tour T-shirt and a snowglobe displaying the house from the ‘cardigan’ music video), I’ve revered her work for some time. But that’s also precisely the reason I’m so frustrated by TTPD; the artist I know to push herself has settled for mediocrity, staying where she’s comfortable instead of daring to do something different. And listen, if she was still making great music within that safe zone, I might give her a free pass (when I first listened to Lady Gaga’s recent MAYHEM, I similarly bemoaned in my review its lack of innovation; the excellence of the songs themselves has meant that it’s since become one of my favourite albums of the year so far). But the songs on TTPD are so stifled and stiff that I get nothing out of them. I wouldn’t go so far to call it a bad album, but it’s boring – arguably a worse sin.

Such is the life of the tortured artist persona that Swift takes great pains to evoke that means she can shroud herself in its aesthetics to the point of defence. (‘Yeah, it’s messy and chaotic, but so is my life! That’s the whole point,’ you imagine her saying from behind a typewriter.) It’s telling that Swift reposted glowing reviews of TTPD on its release; an ‘instant classic’ review by Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield – a longtime Swiftie, it should be noted – celebrated the album’s ‘wildly ambitious and gloriously chaotic’ presentation. But when journalists giving critical reviews of popular albums – not least when that album is so inextricable from its maker’s personal life – risk being roasted on Twitter, what does TTPD’s 76/100 on Metacritic (indicating ‘generally favourable reviews’) even mean if the reviews are all biased?

An incisive article last year from The New Yorker’s Sinéad O’Sullivan posited whether Swift herself – as a geopolitical force, a climate criminal, a monocultural movement – was beyond such trivial things as music criticism. I’d argue the inverse; without constructively criticising art in general, we risk settling and becoming stagnant. Without criticism, we can’t move forward, we make art on our own terms; not a bad thing in principle, but there’s a line. Some thoughts are meant to be published and shared; some should be kept in the drafts. Then there’s the ‘let people enjoy things’ critique of criticism, which negates the fact that you can – gasp! – enjoy things that other people don’t, as well as undermining the effort that someone put into that work of art into the first place. If they’re a true artist, as Swift is, they care about evolving and developing their craft.

Swift performing TTPD track ‘Down Bad’ at The Eras Tour, 2024

Perhaps Swift needs a break. Who can blame her? She ostensibly wrote much, if not all, of TTPD, on tour. She hasn’t gone a year without releasing an album since 2018 – the year of her last tour, no less. This might speak to why TTPD is diaristic first and foremost; I imagine Swift, encased in a cashmere sweater, mug of coffee in hand, holed up in a corner (perhaps on her private jet) journalling as a form of venting. In this vision, she is at once the businesswoman and the poet, the maker and the consumer. That’s the issue with making your music so heavily based on your own life story: when the music gets criticised, to what extent does the person at its centre get caught in the crosshairs? Is it an attack on Taylor Swift if I say I don’t like TTPD? (The answer, despite what Stan Twitter would have you think, is no.)

In a way, Swift’s mission across TTPD – telling you how difficult it is being in her shoes – is fulfilled. By the album’s denouement, I do feel sorry for her, though perhaps not for the reasons she intended; in seemingly believing that output for output’s sake is her best shot at staying relevant, she underestimates her own talent and forgets why fans hold her in such high esteem. With a bit more refinement and a lot more editing, TTPD could have been great; even in its nadirs, like the metaphorically hamfisted and melodically stale ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys’, she offers flashes of brilliance. ‘When I fix me / He’s gonna miss me’ – there’s something minable in there, something truly compelling. The trouble is, Swift is too preoccupied being tortured to meaningfully interrogate why.