These days on the web, the time period principle refers to one thing between a rumor and a prayer: a want so generally expressed that it begins to look true. And a really explicit want fueled all of the theorizing about Taylor Swift’s tenth unique studio album, Midnights. Fans who speculated that she was about to come back out as pansexual, or make a Rumours-level masterpiece of soppy rock, or lastly handle to calm down Kanye West for good all wished the identical factor: a breakthrough. Maybe Taylor Swift could be completely different from who she has lengthy appeared to be. Maybe this intelligent and corny 32-year-old lady from Pennsylvania who likes cats and comfortable sweaters might nonetheless do one thing radical. Maybe—please, please, please—she might free us from our personal banality.
But Midnights shouldn’t be completely different. It is regular. Aggressively regular, aggravatingly regular, and, in its means, excellently regular. She has discovered the cultural established order, and it feels like that Glass Animals track that was in everybody’s TikToks final summer time. What’s distinct about her return to synth pop is simply the flavors she stirs in: oozing bass, surmountable melancholia, and the identical kind of confession and awkwardness that seems 45 minutes into an workplace joyful hour. Transcending expectations is its personal expectation, and Midnights makes clear, with modest poignance, that Swift has burned out on her personal hype.
Listeners did have good cause to assume she’d stage up this time. Before the coronavirus pandemic, she launched two sprawling pop albums—Reputation in 2017 and Lover in 2019—tinged with extremity and experimentation, brilliance and cringe. The isolation of 2020 resulted within the hush of Folklore and Evermore, whose songs had been like spells incanted in uneasy chords and time signatures. Last 12 months, she expanded an previous ballad, “All Too Well,” right into a 10-minute saga that glinted with managed fury. These tinglings of high-art ambition would possibly, logically, have culminated in Midnights, whose ’70s-rock advertising and marketing visuals think of Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks.
Instead, Swift and producer-writer Jack Antonoff selected to shine—not push ahead—an concept that has intrigued her ever for the reason that 2014 hit “Blank Space”: post-Lorde pop modernism, a catchy meld of diarism and drum machines. Fans will thus expertise déjà vu at Midnights’ quick, “Ring Around the Rosie”–type cadences. They’ll simply anticipate the minimal-into-maximal journey a lot of its preparations take. The selection of moodily distorted vocals feels particularly dated; placing humanoid whale moans in an album’s first moments, as Swift and Antonoff have performed, is like opening an IPAs-and-bacon bar in 2022. Yet compositionally, Midnights is modern and durable in a means that no earlier album of hers is. You may need hassle telling its songs aside from each other, however you don’t have to skip any of them.
The idea behind the album title—Swift documenting “13 sleepless nights” over her lifetime—is an excuse to tour by means of previous obsessions: exes, haters, feuds, her beau’s expertise for distracting her from the entire above. As common, contemporary coinages joust with groaners and clichés. (The pretty “Snow on the Beach,” for instance, is nearly ruined by a pointless Janet Jackson reference.) But the concision of Swift’s songcraft and the nuances of her phrasing ought to preserve the listener tuned in. On one disco diss monitor, “Karma,” her silliness turns into a scansion lesson. (Please diagram this double unfavorable: “Karma’s a relaxing thought / aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?”) For the opener, “Lavender Haze,” the cartoon-villain smolder of her voice has human creaks and squeaks.
The palpable weariness of a onetime teen prodigy now in her 30s each offers Midnights ballast and explains its regressive nature. Years right into a settled relationship, comfortable with acclaim and riches, Swift nonetheless is aware of that joyful endings don’t exist. She lies awake, kvetching previous kvetches and draining herself within the course of. So it is sensible that her songs, bumping and bleary, sound like jock jams with continual fatigue. “Maroon” and “Question…?,” two songs about sizzling recollections, churn with a near-tragic mix of power and frustration. On the delightfully trollish “Anti-Hero”—“Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby, and I’m a monster on the hill”—she makes the extremely particular insecurities of a celeb land as a normie gripe with popular culture.
That knack for relatability is her superpower—one so potent that it nearly makes Midnights’ insularity appear noble. Amid the twee musings of “Sweet Nothing,” she sings, “The voices that implore, ‘You should be doing more’ / To you I can admit that I’m just too soft for all of it.” She could be referring to any variety of realms—political, private, musical—that Midnights leaves unexplored because it remaps acquainted house. Being who you’ve at all times been, simply with ever-greater confidence and competence, is, she appears to say, an achievement we should always all aspire to. On the triumphant “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” Swift thinks again to the second in her life when she realized her “dreams aren’t rare.” That realization is, after all, why she’s so extensively liked.