But not everyone’s a fan.
Here’s a round-up of some of the harshest criticism TTPD and its follow-up album has received.
1. NME: “Swift’s 11th studio album is surprisingly flat and, at times, cringeworthy”
“Above all else in her career, Swift has always found acclaim through her lyricism, and comparisons have gleefully been made between herself and The Bard (William Shakespeare). Speaking in February, she says that ‘I have never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on [TTPD]’. It’s surprising, then, that The Tortured Poets Department delivers some of her most cringe-inducing lines yet,” Laura Molloy writes.
“Musically, it’s an album mostly devoid of any noticeable stylistic shift or evolution,” she adds.
2. The Guardian: “Taylor Swift’s new album is about a reckless kind of freedom. If only it sounded as uninhibited”
“The delulu era had found its soundtrack – or at least it would have if TTPD sounded anything like as feral and feckless as its themes,” Laure Snapes writes, referring to the online slang derived from “delusional” about unrealistic standards or beliefs.
3. The NYT: “On The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift could use an editor”
“As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on Midnights, internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: ‘Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,’ she intones in a bouncy cadence on ‘Fresh Out the Slammer,’ one of several songs that lean too heavily on rote prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: ‘Florida,’ apparently, ‘is one hell of a drug.’ If you say so!” Lindsay Zoladz writes.
“Sylvia Plath once called poetry ‘a tyrannical discipline’ because the poet must ‘go so far and so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals’. Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of The Tortured Poets Department would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.”
4. Paste Magazine: “Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!”
A Paste Magazine writer wrote a criticism so vehement that they had to remove their byline from the article entirely.
The critic also goes off about Antonoff and Swift’s lyrics in her album’s opening track “Fortnight”.
“Between producer Jack Antonoff’s atrocious backing instrumentals and the Y2K-era, teen dramedy echo chamber of a vocal harmony provided by out-of-place guest performer Post Malone, ‘Fortnight’ chokes on the vomit of its own opaqueness. ‘I took the miracle move-on drug, the effects were temporary,’ Swift muses, and it sounds like satire. This is your songwriter of the century? Open the schools.”
