As long as we’ve known her, Taylor Swift has played both the songwriter and the singer, the author and the protagonist – and in the last two years, the tortured poet and the billionaire showgirl. Her 2024 album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ chronicled her greatest heartbreak, which occurred alongside her greatest triumphs: the record-breaking Eras Tour, her years-long effort to buy back her master recordings and a whirlwind romance with her now-fiancé, football superstar Travis Kelce. Never one to rest on her laurels, at the start of the recording process for her next album, she declared, “I want to be as proud of an album as I am of the Eras Tour, and for the same reasons.”
Swift’s 12th original studio album, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’, appears anything but modest. She opens it on ‘The Fate of Ophelia’, a love story that sweeps her off her feet – not towards a fairytale ending, but away from Shakespearean tragedy. On ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, Swift spent 31 songs trying to write her way out of heartbreak. Here, it only takes one to undo it.
Gone are the wistfulness and melancholy that permeated her last four albums, yet ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ still sounds curiously muted despite Swift reuniting with pop super-producers Max Martin and Shellback for the first time in eight years. For the most part, these are percussive arrangements with few melodic elements, driven by either crisp ’70s soft-rock drums or ‘Pure Heroine’-esque hip-hop percussion. The focus is almost entirely on her voice and lyrics, without the effervescence nor the subtle emotional shading of recent collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.
Aside from ‘Ophelia’, the other obvious radio single is the pop-rock cut ‘Opalite’, which has a sweetness like ‘Red’ outtake ‘Message in a Bottle’. The difference, though, is that 2012 Swift would never open a love song with lyrics as self-deprecating as “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past / My brother used to call it ‘eating out of the trash’”.
For the starry-eyed young Taylor, romanticism was the entire lens through which she wrote about herself and the world. In her mid-thirties, she still depicts love as pure – but the circumstances around it are rarely so. The acoustic ballad ‘Eldest Daughter’ starts with her being closed-off, then becoming more disarmed the deeper she delves into a relationship. The narrative makes sense, but embodies the album’s oft-mundane emotional stakes: she treats letting her guard down to a lover and airing her grievances towards the internet with the same level of importance.
That’s about as heavy-handed as ‘Showgirl’ gets – it’s arguably Swift’s funniest album, depending on how much you’re laughing with her. On ‘Father Figure’, she interpolates George Michael, addressing her Scott Borchetta-Scooter Braun feud with playfulness for the first time (“I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger!”). Speaking of which, ‘Wood’ is her first ever disco song – a shameless pastiche of The Jackson Five’s ‘I Want You Back’ and Diana Ross’ ‘I’m Coming Out’ that winks at her fiancé’s prowess both in the bedroom and as a podcaster. ‘Wi$h Li$t’ is similarly absurd on paper – imagine ‘Royals’, but written by someone who’s as close to American royalty as it gets – but its domestic fantasy is just sweet enough to feel genuine.
When Swift simply lets herself be, the magic is still there. ‘Ruin the Friendship’, like ‘Betty’, tells of a high-school crush that’s more than meets the eye. “Wilted corsage dangles from my wrist / Over his shoulder I catch a glimpse,” she sings as memories of missed connections fade into her once-classmate’s funeral decades later. In the present, she wishes she had taken the leap: “It was not convenient, no / But I whispered at the grave / ‘Should’ve kissed you anyway’”. Swift’s greatest gift, and the heart of the Eras Tour, has always been for making a song feel like a memory, whether it’s the first or hundredth time you’re hearing it.
But by the next track, ‘Actually Romantic’, she’s resurrecting her ‘Blank Space’ character to allegedly diss Charli XCX, unprovoked. Over a bratty Pixies/Weezer instrumental, she teases, “It sounded nasty but it feels like you’re flirting with me / I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it / It’s kind of making me… wet!” It makes no sense in any broader context – the lyrics of ‘CANCELLED!’ on this album, the reference to Swift on Charli’s ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’, the bridge-mending of the ‘Girl, So Confusing’ remix – except that maybe, she wrote the song just for her own amusement.
The closing title track almost manages to tie all of this together. Alongside Sabrina Carpenter, Swift weaves a tale of an older showgirl named Kitty who warns her off the cutthroat life that is fame. By the song’s end, Taylor turns the tables and takes her own rightful place: “I’m immortal now, baby dolls!” She might still bear the scars, but she didn’t have to sell her soul to get there, nor pull up the ladder behind her – at least in her version of the story. Like Elizabeth Taylor, the public might talk about her private life but they’ll remember her for her career – and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
When Michael Jackson died, TIME Magazine wrote, “In the theater of celebrity tragedy, each play has three acts.” Having averted Ophelia’s fate, Taylor Swift is now in at least her fifth. She remains a compelling protagonist, but her concerns largely take place within the parasocial panopticon that is social media. Just outside the castle walls, America and the world continue to wrestle with climate change, fascism, genocide.
To seek escapism is not a sin, but the best pop music makes the personal feel like life or death. ‘Speak Now’, ‘Reputation’, ‘Folklore’: her greatest works could be genuinely transformative. For the first time, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ sees Swift not catalysed into artistic growth by love, but merely comfortably secured by it.
Details
- Record label: Taylor Swift
- Release date: October 3, 2025