The Tortured Poets Department

Taylor Swift, Republic

★★★★☆

You could hardly describe Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album as longawaited – it’s barely 18 months since her last album, Midnights.

As The Tortured Poets Department underlines, Swift is an authentically skilled songwriter: melodically gifted, thoughtful, witty and willing to take risks. Its sound, co-produced by Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner, splits the difference between the glossy 80s-influenced pop-rock of 1989 and the small-hours understatement of Midnights. It occasionally nods towards Swift’s Nashville past: the shivering wisps of slide guitar on I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can), a fiddle buried deep in But Daddy I Love Him. Florida!!! contains one of the album’s scant handful of big choruses. More often, the album deals in unexpected tangents. So Long, London builds to a climax that never comes, mirroring the doomed relationship it describes.

Which brings us to the lyrics. They return Swift to her safe space, letting a well-known ex have it in no uncertain terms. While So Long, London appears to hymn the end of her six-year relationship to actor Joe Alwyn, the album primarily puts a shorter-lived ex in the firing line: tattooed, unpopular with her fans, the figure is evidently Matty Healy of the 1975. It’s hard not to be impressed by Swift’s ability to turn a celebrity boyfriend into a relatable archetype: we all know someone like the poser in the title track or The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.

Elsewhere, Swift appears uncomfortable with the prurience her level of celebrity commands. She compares fame to an asylum, a circus, a gallows and a lock she dreams of cracking: “I forget if this was ever fun,” she notes dolefully.

There’s a maturity to this album that makes her competitors look wan; if we have to have a single artist dominating pop, we could have picked worse.