Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department full album review

Good news for the lovelorn, the heartbroken, the bereaved or abandoned, with the release of The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift has crafted the soundtrack to your pain. And while it might break you it will also help put you back together again.

On her 11th studio album, the global pop superstar doesn’t pull any emotional punches as she sets off, with her sharpened pen, like an expert cartographer out to map the dark side of the human heart, returning with what is undoubtedly her most assured, brazen and artistically ambitious album to date.

And as if pulling together an album while also touring with her record-breaking, billion-dollar-grossing, world-conquering Eras Tour, wasn’t enough, two hours after dropping the 16 original TTPD tracks, she surprised the world with an additional 15 songs.

A cruel move, because it’s hard to stay on your toes, when you’re lying broken on the floor.

Lyrically Swift is at her spikey, vengeful, and aggrieved best. She’s clearly sick of her love life being publicly picked apart while she’s left to pick up the pieces. While her poison pen most often targets her ex-lovers, here she is railing against the world, against the pressures on a doomed romance, her critics (oh, and Kim Kardashian on thanK you aIMee). Perhaps at 34, she’s grown to realise it’s not always the person but the circumstances that are to blame.

TTPD was never going to be a cheery collection of upbeat pop anthems. This was the album where the singer was going to crack herself open and expose her deepest, most sacred thoughts and feelings and let the listeners reap the benefits.

On night one of the Australian leg of her Eras Tour, she said it was an album born of necessity.

“Tortured Poets is an album that I think more than any of my albums that I’ve ever made, I needed to make it,” she told the 96,000-strong crowd at Melbourne’s MCG.

“It was really a lifeline for me, just the things I was going through, the things I was writing about. It kind of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life. And I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more.”

But, spoiler alert, contrary to popular opinion, this isn’t a break-up album about Joe Alwyn, her British actor beau of six years from whom she split in April last year. Although, he is clearly the subject of So Long, London.

Rather, and much to the disgust of certain sectors of her fanbase, it is Matty Healy, lead singer with the UK band The 1975 who is the main character in this tragic love story. The pair, who have known each other for a decade, briefly dated for two months after her break from Alwyn, but she makes it clear that Healy was her Tortured Poet and she was down bad.

In But Daddy I Love Him she pulls no punches as she addresses those who called for her to be placed under a conservatorship and circulated an anonymous online letter known as #SpeakUpNow demanding she end her relationship with the misunderstood/or problematic (depending on your viewpoint) frontman.

“God save the most judgmental creeps, Who say they want what’s best for me, Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see, Thinking it can change the beat of my heart when he touches me, And counteract the chemistry,” she snarls.

Sonically the album is somehow both sprawling and intimate featuring soaring melodies against a vast pop synth backdrop. Long-term producer Jack Antonoff, who has also worked extensively with Lana Del Ray, seems to perhaps forget which artist he was working with. However, the atmospheric approach serves the songs well and marks a musical progression for Swift, who has made it clear since swerving from country to pop with 1989 and into indie folk territory on sister lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore, that she is always willing to adapt and change.

Lead single Fortnight featuring and co-written by Post Malone serves as the perfect introduction to the album and a stylised black and white, gothic video clip is set for release to accompany the song today.

Elsewhere British artist Florence + the Machine (aka Florence Welch) lends her soaring vocals and songwriting talents to Florida!!! For many, this is a dream collaboration finally realised and it doesn’t disappoint.

TTPD is expected to shatter streaming and sales records, many of which are already held by Swift including the biggest first-week debut for an album of the 2020s which she holds for 1989 (Taylor’s Version) with 1.653 million units.

It is also guaranteed to top the Billboard 200, becoming Swift’s 14th No. 1 album. It will tie her with Jay-Z for the most No. 1s for a solo artist, with only The Beatles achieving more No.1s with 19 albums.

While 31 songs are a lot to absorb in one sitting, one thing is certain, this is the work of an artist at the top of their game, who, 18 years into her career has reached the dizzying heights of success reserved for generation-defining artists.

With The Tortured Poets Department, Swift has consolidated her position as the poet laureate of her generation, tortured or otherwise.

4.5 stars