It’s been an exhausting few years to be a Taylor Swift fan.
Toggling between new releases and ‘Taylor’s Version’ re-records as she traversed the globe on the highest-grossing tour of all time, Swift somehow managed to put out eight albums between 2020 and 2024.
Hours after her last album The Tortured Poets Department was released in April of last year, Swift dropped another surprise: It was actually a double album. The resulting 31-song, two-hour slog of a record tested all but the most ardent fans’ patience.
Now, 18 months later comes an album that rights many of those wrongs, coming in at a concise 41 minutes across its 12 tracks.
It also reunites Swift with collaborators Max Martin and Shellback – Swedish pop masterminds who’d worked on the majority of two of her very best albums, 1989 and Reputation – to deliver a capital P pop album front- loaded with potential hits.
There are, however, a few missteps here, meaning The Life of a Showgirl never quite scales the heights of those earlier albums.
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Showgirl starts strong: Opening track and lead single The Fate of Ophelia is the first in a triple whammy of future Taylor classics, all bubbling, moody synths that erupt into a cascading chorus.
Second song Elizabeth Taylor is Swift in self-mythologising mode with another sky high chorus that’s equal parts Taylor and Max Martin.
Then, the Fleetwood Mac meets ABBA vibe of the summery Opalite completes the hat trick: If Swift rolls out these three as singles, she could have number one hits in the bag for the next year.
Track four, Father Figure, is where things start to go slightly pear-shaped. It’s sung from the perspective of a toxic music industry bro whose name may or may not rhyme with Booter Scraun, but it never rises above cliche – all “making a deal with the devil” and “sleeping with the fishes” (although it does feature Swift memorably bragging “my dick’s bigger”).
And sadly it bears little melodic resemblance to the superior George Michael song it claims to sample – seems like there was a pre-emptive credit given there to ward off any plagiarism claims over the title.
Eldest Daughter is a pretty piano ballad again scuppered by some cringeworthy lyrics, this time about trolling and memes, but one song later lies the beating heart of the album: Ruin the Friendship.
At first, hearing Taylor sing about a wilted corsage and hanging out in “second period” might provoke a groan: Is she still singing about being a high schooler? But as the song unfolds, it reveals itself to be a three-and-a-half minute romantic tragedy, the sort Swift does so well, with a genuinely moving coda about the importance of taking chances in life, before it’s too late. It’s her best (presumably) fictional songwriting since folklore.
From those highs to one unfathomable low: You’ve got a stronger constitution than me if you don’t approach a Taylor Swift song called CANCELLED! with some trepidation.
“Good thing I like my friends caaaaancelled, I like ‘em cloaked in Gucci and in scaaaaandal,” she sings like a moustache-twirling pantomime villain, declaring that her “infamy loves company.” It’s Reputation (Aldi Version) and it again suggests Swift considers herself a much more controversial public figure than she actually is: File alongside Vigilante S**t and Look What You Made Me Do as Taylor-gone-bad songs we never need to hear again.
Elsewhere, Swift’s reunion with Martin and Shellback hasn’t just resulted in 12 boilerplate Swedish-made pop songs – there are some unexpected diversions here (Max is in his quirky era lately: Check out his work on Canadian pop singer Debbii Dawson’s recent potential song of the year,I Want You).
Chief among them is Actually Romantic, destined to be the album’s most talked-about song given it’s a pretty pointed diss track that many fans already suspect is about fellow pop star Charli XCX. The petty lyrics are a perfect match with the soundscape, all distorted Pixies guitar licks – a genuinely new sound for Swift.
Also a new sound for her, but less successfully so, is Wood, a limp bit of disco-funk that aims for Jackson 5 but arrives at Trolls 2 soundtrack. Still, it does feature a lyric that suggests some of Eras tour opening act Sabrina Carpenter’s raunch has rubbed off on Swift: “His love was the key that opened my thighs.”
Which, of course, brings us to Travis Kelce. Showgirl feels an album of two halves – Swift is either taking aim at her enemies or declaring her love for her new fiance. Wi$h Li$t is the most revealing of these loved-up tunes, a song about yearning to settle down, have kids and living a normal life out of the public eye.
“We tell the world to leave us the f**k alone and they do,” Swift sings, knowing that would never happen, before singing a lyric that might just make it into her wedding vows: “I made a wish upon the stars, ‘Please god bring me a best friend who I think is hot.’”
Happiness with Kelce, she declares, “Got me dreaming bout a driveway with a basketball hoop” (which perhaps suggests she hasn’t been paying the closest attention at all those Kansas City Chiefs games).
So, is this all a hint at what’s to come for Swift after the herculean workload of the past few years? Will she settle down, start a family, shun the spotlight?
The album ends on a high with the title track and Sabrina Carpenter duet, a shimmering ode to the highs and lows of being a woman in showbiz. One line suggests Travis shouldn’t expect to get his new fiance all to himself any time soon: “I’m married to the hustle … wouldn’t have it any other way.”
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