Taylor Swift Tortured Poets Department review: Album finds star vulnerable but vicious

That Taylor Swift would write a break-up album is no surprise. Over her last 10 records, the star has taken a scalpel to her personal life, filleting the details of flings and trysts and heartbreaks to create some of pop's most memorable lyrics.

For the last half-decade, she's been in romantic mode. Songs like Delicate, Lover, Invisible String and Lavender Haze were all inspired by her boyfriend of six years, the British actor Joe Alwyn. They were so close that Swift moved to London, and shared writing credits with Alwyn (under the pseudonym William Bowery) on her Grammy Award-winning albums Folklore and Midnights. Then, in April 2023, a month after Swift kicked off her record-breaking Eras tour, it was announced that they had split. An anonymous source told People magazine it was "amicable" and "not dramatic". But when the singer announced her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, at the Grammys this February, fans began to speculate it would deal with the fall-out. They were quick to note how the title bore similarities to a group chat shared by Alwyn and his fellow actor Paul Mescal: The Tortured Man Club. Then, Swift told the audience at a concert in Melbourne that the album was her most cathartic project yet. "It kind of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life," she said. "I've never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets."

The highly anticipated album was released at 5am UK time around the world

The singer is bereft and bewildered. Vulnerable in a way we've never heard before. She sings of being so depressed she can't get out of bed, comfort-eating children's cereal, and crying at the gym. You can hear her heart breaking on So Long, London, as she accepts defeat and moves out.

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Later, she demands answers, wanting to know "if rusting my sparkling summer was the goal". That line appears in the viciously-titled The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, a song that opens with a weary sigh but crescendos with anger and paranoia. "Were you writing a book? / Were you a sleeper cell spy? / In 50 years will all this be declassified / And you'll confess why you did it?" In the sleeve notes for the album, Swift acknowledges both the turmoil of the relationship and the sharpness of her pen. "It was a mutual manic phase. It was self harm. It was house and then cardiac arrest," she writes, before adding: "A smirk creeps onto this poet's face. Because it's the worst men that I write best."

Swift and Alwyn at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards

Some fans felt let down by the relationship, saying that Healy - who has faced accusations of misogyny and racism in his career (all of which he denies) - was an inappropriate choice of partner. In her song, Swift hits back, declaring: "I'd rather burn my whole life down than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning / I'll tell you something about my good name, it's mine alone to disgrace."

The album was made in collaboration with Aaron Dessner (left, from The National) and Jack Antonoff (right, frontman of Bleachers)

Barbed lyrics like those prevent the album from becoming dreary with sadness; but the production (supplied by Swift's long-term collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner) can smother her more vengeful instincts. The music is full of the pillowy synths and muted drums that served the hypnagogic vibes of her last album, Midnights, so well. That's fine when she submits to melancholy on the delicately percolating Bad Down, but when she writes something salty and mischievous like Who's Afraid Of Little Old Me? it gets suffocated by layers of echo and gauzy strings. Source: BBC