Taylor Swift has Showgirled too close to the sun

This article originally appeared in the New School Free Press and was edited by Zora Edelstein and Megan Liu.

I’m breaking up with Taylor Swift. When she released The Tortured Poet’s Department in 2024,  I was disappointed — though willing to pass it off as a dud in an otherwise monumental discography. As a die-hard defender of what are considered some of her greatest mistakes (my top two albums of hers are Midnights and reputation, respectively), I felt that TTPD committed the only error that couldn’t be excused: being boring. But today, I’ve found myself returning to it with a new kind of admiration. All of a sudden, the songs sound lush, poetic, and delicate. I’ve discovered that there actually is something worse than boring: empty. 

The Life of a Showgirl is Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, announced two months earlier on the sports podcast hosted by her fiancé, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce (a nearly self-satirizing beginning alone). There she detailed a glamorous record meant to be an ode to the titular life of a showgirl, as inspired by being on her record-breaking year-and-a-half Eras Tour. She spoke of “melodies so infectious you’re almost angry” and “lyrics that are vivid and crisp.” It was 35 minutes of promises that Showgirl would be Swift’s greatest album yet, accented every few sentences by glowing endorsements from Kelce, promising “bangers” throughout the whole record. She took the feedback from fans and critics alike: her last album was critiqued for being too long (31 songs in total) and too Jack Antonoff, so this time she promised only twelve songs, and no Antonoff to be found, trading him for earlier collaborators (and pop legends) Max Martin and Shellback. 

Martin’s is a name every pop fan should know, as he can justifiably be credited with creating the pop sound we know today. His formulaic approach to melodic hooks has scored him 27 No. 1 singles on the Hot 100, an all-time record for producers and the second-highest number for writers (behind only Paul McCartney). He’s claimed hit after hit with frequent collaborator Shellback, so their full-album collaboration with Swift should be a guaranteed success, right? 

But in Showgirl, something is wrong. Swift claimed this album would sound dramatic, something the trio has achieved in years past. But Showgirl sounds less like reputation’s big, synth-y swings and more like Red’s indie-twee coffee shop crossed with the kind of generic, vaguely throwback pop sound that reminds one of a Kohl’s dressing room. What happened? Martin has scored hits recently, his last No. 1 being Ariana Grande’s “yes, and?” in 2024, a ‘90s-house-inspired dance track that feels both perfectly nostalgic and yet still fresh. But instead, Showgirl is full of laid-back lounge drums and reverb-dulled guitars at best. At worst, the choices are so cringe-worthy it’s almost painful – stomp-clap songs haven’t been cool since 2012, Max. 

The producers aren’t the only ones to blame for the disjointedly dated sound. All three have writing credits on every song, but Swift speaks so fondly of this choice that it’s fair to assume it was hers. The album is littered with millennial-cringe-inducing attempts at satirical relevance that fall flat when the language she’s trying to parody hasn’t been used in five years. Among the phrases used on the album: “keep it 100,” “bad bitch,” “savage,” “boss up,” “fat ass,” and “girl-boss too close to the sun.” “All I really use the internet for is sourdough,” she says on the New Heights podcast, which is easy to believe when all her references are from back when X was still called Twitter. Perhaps one of the most damning lines is from “Eldest Daughter.” “Every eldest daughter/Was the first lamb to the slaughter/So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.” It’s a perfect example of how every shred of poetic hope to be found on this album is destroyed within moments. 

Far more damningly, the album is missing one of the crucial skills Swift is most known for: metaphors. What happened to the woman who once wrote herself into being a fox running from a hunter, a crumpled-up piece of paper lying on the ground, a mirror ball? The few feeble attempts at metaphor fall through, with “The Fate of Ophelia” sounding less like her romantic Romeo and Juliet tale it recalls and more like the damsel-in -incapacitated-distress trope distilled into a song. She first mentioned folklore-style lyricism in the podcast, but clarified the statement in the footage from The Release Party of a Showgirl, an AMC-exclusive screening of behind-the-scenes interviews: it wasn’t the Wordsworth-style grand poetics or the devastating meditations on loss, no — it was the fact that half the stories are entirely fictional. On folklore, Swift was praised for the technique, with many new fans positing that maybe that was what she should’ve been doing for her whole career. But on Showgirl, it falls flat, full of such literal event narrations that it feels like Swift should be writing short stories instead of songs (the title track is perhaps the worst culprit). She makes up characters this time that are less complex explorations of humanity and youth and more straight-up tropes, admitting to combining a number of high school friends’ stories for “Ruin the Friendship” and describing “Eldest Daughter” as simply a collection of stereotypical character traits. 

When she does try to write about her real life, it comes crashing down around her in a flaming pile of bitterness and a series of thinly-veiled phallic innuendos. “Actually Romantic,” a song about how her haters give her so much attention it borders on romantic love (and somewhat uncomfortably, also shares that it “[makes her] wet”), shoots for witty comeback and lands deep in obsessive desperation. Insulting the haters for thinking about you too much doesn’t work when they’re the literal subject you’re writing songs about. “Wi$h Li$t” portrays her detailing what she imagines normal people to want (yachts and “Balenci’ shades”), made to contrast with her desires for a suburban, domestic paradise. While she takes care not to contrast the values of the two, it’s a strange concept for a song: Hey, you want all of these things that I have, that’s cool, hope you get them! I want to have kids! There are multiple angles this concept could play that could provide interesting commentary (like how one’s desires shift under the pressures of fame, or even the differences between materially having it all and having happiness). Instead, we’re simply given a flat Santa’s list of desires with no particular message. 

Somehow, “Wood” might be my favorite song, simply because it consistently inspires bewildered laughter. Instead of being upfront and mature about the erotic topic of the song (like on reputation highlight “Dress”), she chooses to disguise the second song about sex of her career in themes of superstition while haphazardly innuendo-ing lines like “Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet/To know a hard rock is on the way.” In my least favorite track, “CANCELLED!,” Taylor Swift makes the provocative claim that she “like[s] [her] friends cancelled." Like many other references on the album, the debate on “cancel culture” peaked years ago. She proclaims in the interviews that it’s meant to be relatable to anyone who might “feel cancelled” in the modern internet culture, but this fails as an appeal to relatability from a woman most recently “cancelled” for flying her private jet so many times she became the celebrity with the worst CO2 emissions in 2022. She claims she “likes [her] whisky sour/And poison thorny flowers” — well, Taylor, I regret to inform you there won’t be any more flowers if we don’t do something about the amount of CO2 emissions in our environment. 

The Life of a Showgirl is less of an album and more of a void for pop music fans to fall into. Swift holds the whole world’s attention when she releases an album, and with this one, she chose to use that power to waste 41 minutes of a record-breaking number of people’s time. Lacking in metaphor, reality, complexity, and good synths, I can only hope that she’s got some better stories (or stories at all) in her head by the next one. I honestly fear that a second bad album in a row might mark the end of Swift’s gargantuan reign. My final message of hope for the Swiftie future is to producer Jack Antonoff: WE’RE SORRY, PLEASE SAVE US!