For a sense of what’s been animating Taylor Swift lately, fast forward to a pair of sprightly, winky, sweaty songs in the second half of her new album, “The Life of a Showgirl.”
First, there’s “Actually Romantic,” a leering ode to an enemy whose attention is so total, so focused, that it can’t help but feel like a form of lust. “It sounded nasty, but it feels like you’re flirting with me,” Swift sings over a chugging guitar line, before concluding with a pant: “It’s kind of making me wet.”
A couple of songs later comes “Wood,” an almost goofy ode to a … reliable lover. Following an ecstatic guitar intro cribbed heavily from the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” Swift cycles through 10 or so blushing metaphors before singing oh-so-sweetly, “It ain’t hard to see / His love was the key / That opened my thighs.”
All of which is to say, Swift is hungry — hungry to move on from the battles of her past and into the embraces of her future.
That sentiment is all over her 12th original album, a deceptively modest set of songs about the facade of fame, and what it takes to scrape it away and claw past it. Swift has been pop’s alpha figure for more than a decade, a spot she’s clung to ruthlessly. “Showgirl” isn’t precisely a goodbye to all that, but it does cast a wary eye on her past while greeting her future with a glee that verges on the unbridled.
It also serves as an implicit capstone to Swift’s career to date. In the 18 months since the release of her last album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift has brought her Eras Tour to a close after 149 shows on five continents, making it the most financially successful tour in history; she regained control of all of her master recordings in a deal worth a reported $360 million and subsequently brought the project of rerecording her early albums to an end; and she announced her engagement to the football star Travis Kelce.
Each of these mark a significant Swift narrative coming to a conclusion — “The Life of a Showgirl” suggests how she might be moving forward, when it’s not firmly burying old bones. A catchy and substantive but unflashy album, it takes the songwriting intimacy of her “Folklore”/“Evermore” era and renders it with more clarity and oomph. It’s made entirely with Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish pop wizards she’s previously turned to for career-reset hits like “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” from “Red,” and much of her peak-pop triumph “1989,” including “Shake It Off” and “Bad Blood.” But here, they aren’t world-makers so much as point-provers, effortlessly underscoring Swift’s frisky and taut songwriting, which remains in sharp form.
“Showgirl” is being presented as the soundtrack to Swift’s emergent romantic bliss, and the opening three songs focus intently on that sentiment. The calmly ecstatic “The Fate of Ophelia” pledges undying devotion to the person who “dug me out of my grave and / Saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia.” (Swift’s discussion of “Hamlet” on Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast in August was, of course, a hint.)
That’s followed by the melodramatic “Elizabeth Taylor,” in which she links her romantic history to a Hollywood figure who was legendarily loved, and unloved, and loved again. After that comes the unrelentingly bright “Opalite,” one of the most classic Swift-Martin songs here, with flickers of Fleetwood Mac and girl group harmony, and Swift viciously looking in her mirror — “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past / My brother used to call it ‘Eating out of the trash’” — before exulting in a love that rescued her from “dancing through the lightning strikes.”
Having made its point about Swift’s future, “Showgirl” then turns backward — to settle scores, to harvest slippery memories, to roll eyes at the sort of glamorous life stars are expected to chase and embody. If the beginning of the album is a swaddle, the rest is a shedding.
The dispatching of enemies begins with “Father Figure,” a surprisingly chipper but determined dismantling of someone — perhaps Scott Borchetta, Swift’s former label head, who sold Swift’s masters in the first place — who tried to leverage power and experience over her, only to have the tables turned. Swift sings it with cool nerve, an assassin acquiring her target and boasting, “Turns out my dick’s bigger.” (The song’s nod to George Michael, credited as a writer, is rhythmically subtle, not literal.)
“Actually Romantic” is perhaps a rejoinder to Charli XCX’s purported swipe at Swift on “Sympathy Is a Knife” (or, if the crunch of the guitar is a tell, perhaps at Swift’s wayward daughter Olivia Rodrigo). Even “Honey,” the most saccharine song on the album — an up-tempo nod to one of her most breathless love songs, “New Year’s Day” — is more focused on the cruel people who wielded pet names like weapons long before someone Swift trusted used them like an embrace.
To the extent Swift is concerned with musical inheritance, she makes her allegiance known with the album’s only guest, Sabrina Carpenter, who offers country-esque sympathy on the title track, alternately reveling in and lamenting how the spotlight demands hardened versions of the self. Given that it’s the driving image of the album cycle, it feels like a tacked-on afterthought as the final song.
Nevertheless, it’s consistent with much of the rest of “Showgirl,” on which the enemy is celebrity itself — the meditative “Eldest Daughter” is an ironic ballad about online cool. “I’m not a bad bitch,” Swift sings at the chorus, one of her most convincing vocals on the album. That freedom to be basic also colors “Wish List,” the poppiest song here, cooed on a bed of sparkling synths.
The lone false note is the stomping, moody “Cancelled!” in which Swift aligns herself with the villains of public life: “At least you know exactly who your friends are / They’re the ones with matching scars.” It’s a callback to a more victim-centered version of Swift from the 2010s, when she made the tension between the reality of fame and its image central to her work. In this context, though, it sounds almost comically theatrical, an overwrought protest of yesteryear.
“Showgirl” isn’t a hard pivot like “Red” or “Reputation,” risky-in-their-moment albums that expanded Swift’s musical palette. Topically, it feels most kin to “Reputation,” but her collaborators aren’t slathering her in gloss or skronk here, instead letting her songwriting breathe. It is also something of an Eras Tour in miniature — “Cancelled!” sounds like a “Reputation” outtake; “Ruin the Friendship,” about a missed teen connection, recalls the wide-eyed “Fearless.” In that way, “Showgirl” is a more cogent form of chaos than Swift’s prior two albums, “Midnights” and “The Tortured Poets Department,” which were unwieldy and centerless.
Marital bliss, and the resolution of all of Swift’s previously unfinished business, may well provide the opportunity for a more grounded album in the future. Swift seems to long for that on “Wish List”: “We tell the world to leave us the [expletive] alone, and they do.” “Showgirl” has hints of what a Swift album about requited love might sound like, but for now, she’s not quite over the taste of blood.
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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