Taylor Swift has debuted the first music video for her polarising new album.
The US pop star, 35, dropped a “jaw-dropping” film clip for The Fate of Ophelia – the lead single on her twelfth studio album The Life Of A Showgirl, which lobbed to a mixed reaction on Friday.
In possibly her most experimental and visually breathtaking shoot to date, Swift – who also directed the video – is seen taking on the titular doomed 16th century character who is driven mad by love in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
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Opening with Swift laying in a pond in a vintage white gown and lengthy blonde hair, the forest set backdrop is pulled apart as her character then transitions into a Marilyn Monroe-esque look, entering a dressing room before hitting the stage in various iterations of her bedazzling showgirl persona.
In a sophisticated video leaning heavily on stylish production, Swift dons up to a dozen showgirl-inspired looks in a theatre setting, before the music video ends on Swift laying idle in a bathtub, per the album’s cover imagery.
Swifties have flooded the comment section during the video’s YouTube debut, with dozens dubbing it her best music video to date.
“I just LOVE the storytelling! One of Taylor’s best music videos ever, it’s such a great production,” one wrote.
“Yall, it is JAW DROPPING AND AMAZING,” another said.
“This is 100% one of her best ones ever,” a third added.
A fourth wrote, “Art in motion, visually stunning and captivating.”
Swift previously explained the inspiration for the song, saying she wanted to rewrite Ophelia’s tragic fate and create her own ending.
“I just have this fixation on Shakespeare characters that I fall in love with and I can’t stand to see them meet a tragic demise,” she told Hits Radio UK.
“I can’t. I don’t want that to be what happened to them.
“Kind of going back to the song Love Story, which I wrote when I was a teenager, I was just like, ‘I can’t watch Romeo and Juliet not work out. What do you mean they both die?’ They don’t in my version of things …
“This is a little bit like that, where The Fate of Ophelia talks about how, you know, Ophelia was driven mad by love. The hook says, ‘You dug me out of my grave and saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia.’ So it’s a love song.”
Commercially, the 12-track album has proved a runaway success. The Fate of Ophelia broke the single-day streaming record for a song on Spotify, breaking her own record set by 2024’s Fortnight, the latter of which had 25 million streams in a day.
The Life of a Showgirl also registered the highest single-day sales in US history with 2.7 million copies sold.
But unlike her last few albums, which have been largely critically acclaimed, Swift has generated a deeply mixed reaction to her latest release, which she earlier announced on fiance Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast in August.
Critics have described some of the lyrics as “cringe”, particularly after the mastery of 2020’s folklore, with further complaints the melodies were largely forgettable following Swift’s promise the music was all “bangers”.
After that bold declaration, many were anticipating a reimagined version of 1989, Swift’s 2014 album littered with a flurry of enduring earworms from Blank Space to Style and Wildest Dreams.
In one of the most damning reviews, The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis found there were a “distinct lack of undeniable hooks and nailed-on melodies. The songs are well turned, but in terms of genuinely memorable moments, Showgirl evinces just one killer chorus (Elizabeth Taylor).”
On the other side, Rolling Stone granted the album a maximum five-star rating.
“Only a sucker would think the curtain close of the Eras Tour marked the end of Swift’s almighty reign in the pop sphere. With her 12th studio album, the musician shoots into a fresh echelon of superstardom — and hits all her marks,” critic Maya Georgi penned.
The verdict from news.com.au’s Nick Bond: The album has some killer choruses – but a few unforgivable clangers on the tracklist that stop it from scaling the heights of some of her previous albums.
Swift co-produced Showgirl with previous collaborators Max Martin and Shellback, who worked alongside the Grammy winner on some of her earlier albums including Red and 1989.
The trio produced the work entirely in Sweden while Swift was embarking on her 18-month long Eras Tour.
Swift said on New Heights back in August the album reflected her backstage mindset while globetrotting for the highest-grossing tour of all time.
“I wanted to glamorise all the different aspects of how that tour felt, and how it felt to be at the end of the night when all this has gone down, you won’t be able to get to bed until 4am, you had to jump through 50 million hoops in this obstacle course that is your show, but you did it,” she said.
“And the reason I wanted to have an offstage moment as the main album cover is because it’s not what happened to me onstage, it’s about what I was going through offstage. This to me tells more of what the actual contents, lyrically, of the album are, which is the life of a showgirl.
“It feels energetically how my life has felt, and this album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant.”
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