Swift doesn’t call names, however she drops quite a few boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural courting that has grown chilly (the wrenching “So Lengthy, London”), in short taking over with a tattooed unhealthy boy who raises the hackles of the extra judgmental other people in her lifestyles (the wild-eyed “However Daddy I Love Him”) and beginning contemporary with any individual who makes her sing in — ahem — soccer metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The topic of essentially the most headline-grabbing observe on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Membership whom Swift reimagines as a highschool bully, is correct there within the name’s strange capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”
Every now and then, the album is a go back to shape. Its first two songs are potent reminders of ways viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Submit Malone, is cold and regulated till traces like “I really like you, it’s ruining my lifestyles” encourage the track to thaw and glow. Even higher is the chatty, radiant name observe, on which Swift’s voice glides throughout clean keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly evaluating herself and her lover to extra bold poets prior to concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Resort, we’re trendy idiots.” Many Swift songs get misplaced in dense thickets of their very own vocabulary, however right here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to pals, a connection with the pop songwriter Charlie Puth?! — is surprisingly humanizing.
For all its sprawl, even though, “The Tortured Poets Division” is a interestingly insular album, continuously cradled within the acquainted, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s manufacturing. (Aaron Dessner of the Nationwide, who lends a extra muted and natural sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write 5 tracks at the first album, and the vast majority of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift were running in combination since he contributed to her blockbuster album “1989” from 2014, and he has transform her maximum constant collaborator. There’s a sonic uniformity to a lot of “The Tortured Poets Division,” on the other hand — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum system rhythms that lock Swift right into a clipped, chirping staccato — that means their partnership has transform too at ease and dangers rising stale.
Because the album is going on, Swift’s lyricism begins to really feel unrestrained, vague and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless traces overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Dead nights,” inner rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Digicam flashes, welcome bashes, get the suits, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she intones in a bouncy cadence on “Recent Out the Slammer,” one in all a number of songs that lean too closely on rote jail metaphors. Narcotic imagery is any other inspiration for a few of Swift’s maximum trite and head-scratching writing: “Florida,” it appears, “is one hell of a drug.” In case you say so!
That track, even though, is without doubt one of the album’s highest — a thunderous collaboration with the pop sorceress Florence Welch, who blows in like a gust of unpolluted air and lets in Swift to harness a extra theatrical and dynamic aesthetic. “To blame as Sin?,” any other beautiful access, is the uncommon Antonoff manufacturing that frames Swift’s voice now not in inflexible electronics however in a ’90s soft-rock setting. On those tracks specifically, crisp Swiftian pictures emerge: an imagined lover’s “messy top-lip kiss,” 30-something pals who “all odor like weed or little small children.”