THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT

The whole album is a terrific reminder of the intense, personal connection Swift can conjure in song.

“The Tortured Poets Department” feels like it comes the closest of any of her 11 original albums to just drilling a tube directly into her brain and letting listeners mainline what comes out. If you value this confessional quality most of all, she’s still peaking: As a culmination of her particular genius for marrying cleverness with catharsis, “Tortured” kind of feels like the Taylor Swift-est Taylor Swift record ever.

In Swift’s capable hands, even the deepest moments of despair are transmuted into songs which resonate with emotion and genuine insight.

These songs are calculated, complete, and the most experimental and ambitious of Swift’s work to date.

This is not the perfect record with a lot of unevenness, but they found the right approach which means that to master it and finally reach a perfect match, they need to do another one with the same settings.

Ultimately, this may be Swift’s most Swiftian album: the unhappiness profound, the details generous, the lessons absorbed.

Towards the end of the album, tracks threaten to meld into each other, making for one big visceral haze of love-lamenting. But beat seekers should find their bag on dynamic tracks like ‘Florida!!!’, a thumping, bewitching collaboration with Florence + The Machine, ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,’ and triumphantly-erupting, more optimistic ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.’

It's less playful than before but feels like an evolution rather than an adjustment. There's a more textural feel than before, edging closer to the muted space of Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher, or Antonoff's work with Lana Del Rey, and it suits Swift well as this point in her career.

The LP turns out to be something of a heel turn; it’s got a proudly villainous energy as Swift embraces her messiest and most chaotic tendencies. .... All this lore — it’s a lot. Yet “The Tortured Poets Department” also showcases Swift’s gifts as a songwriter, musician and producer. Her melodies are sticky and her arrangements grabby; working in the studio with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, she’s honed an electro-acoustic style that’s instantly identifiable.

In terms of emotional insight and sheer singer-songwriter genius, it is not in the league of such heartbreak classics as Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Joni Mitchell's Blue, but at least it reaches for such heights.

If you wanted to pick holes, The Tortured Poets Department is a shade too long.

The Tortured Poets Department plays out as a pop album that sounds fine enough but sure is long-winded.

The songs themselves range from the good (the surprisingly energetic I Can Do It With A Broken Heart, throwback ballad But Daddy I Love Him, the extra textures of the Florence + The Machine duet, Florida!!!) to the somewhat samey but still enjoyable (So Long, London; the title track; Fresh Out the Slammer), to the unnecessary retreads (Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?, The Alchemy), to the truly rotten (Down Bad – which can’t manage to disguise its hollowness with truly beautiful textures, and I Can Fix Him).

Throughout, she marches from truly great lyricism that is on par with the very best of her contemporary idols and peers to unfiltered writing that leads to more ridicule on TikTok than engagement with the listener. Musically, the project is also split between deeply engaging material that is her best yet, while the main album at times just seems too homogenous for its own good in locked in mid-tempo and synth-pop.