She doesn’t sound like she’s having fun. She has the team captain, the cushion-cut diamond, the fans who will shell out for yet another branded cardigan—but Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, and the life it seems to portray, is a charmless chore. Swift spends her 12th album pondering familiar bummers: rivalries, regrets, the countdown clock of her own mortality. What’s new, narratively, is her football-player fiancé and the happily ever after he represents. But she can’t quite convince herself, or the listener, that she’s getting what she’s always said she wants. She’s become too cynical to sell a fairy tale.
Theoretically this is an interesting place for Swift, that ever-striving Sagittarius, to be: at the end of a checklist of goals and still unsatisfied. Her economies-quaking Eras Tour flaunted the power earned by years of hard work; her engagement to Travis Kelce appeared to fulfill the romantic quest she has long sung about. Success certainly puts her under no obligation to fake a smile and hide her anxieties. Unfortunately, Showgirl is the sound of an overworked and overexposed entertainer reaching the mountaintop to find something worse than disappointment: burnout.
From the moment it was announced in August, Showgirl was sold as a bedazzled return to pure pop. Swift recorded it on tour, using free days to fly to Sweden to work with the legendary producer Max Martin and his collaborator Shellback. Their methods—ruthless melodic math, brazenly artificial production, and an odd soft spot for reggae rhythms—helped define the world-conquering sound of Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys. When Martin first teamed up with Swift for 2012’s Red, their partnership propelled her from country-music fame into the echelon of megastardom where she still resides.
Ever since 2019’s Lover, though, she’s preferred to work with indie-rock dudes (chiefly Jack Antonoff) who draw out her arty side. Her fascinating but unwieldy 2024 release, The Tortured Poets Department, seemed to push that phase of her career as far as it could go. That album prioritized emotional and narrative complexity over catchy sing-alongs. Showgirl, she said on her fiancé’s podcast, is a return to “melodies that are so infectious that you’re almost angry at it, and lyrics that are just as vivid but crisp and focused and completely intentional.”
The album sometimes does fit that description—especially on the relatively strong, if unexpectedly downcast, opening three songs. “The Life of Ophelia” pairs delicate snares with an indelicate bass line as Swift raids Shakespeare to find a synonym for damsel in distress. Next, “Elizabeth Taylor” layers reverberating refrains for a smoldering, cinematic effect. (It has some solid scene-setting, too: “We hit the best booth at Musso & Frank’s / They say I’m bad news; I just say, ‘Thanks.’”) “Opalite” is an inspirational vocabulary lesson whose chorus is delivered with ’80s-rock pep worthy of Richard Simmons.
But the difference between effective and great pop is the ingredients missing here: novelty and passion. Swift and Martin’s previous highlights ambushed the ear with dubstep that crashed into country (“I Knew You Were Trouble”), satirical boom-bap (“Blank Space”), and industrial-R&B chaos (Reputation). A molten emotional core—an oh-so-Swedish mixture of glee and gloom—energized the exploration. Showgirl, however, sounds freeze-dried, prepacked, obvious. Though the album’s genres are superficially diverse—you’ll hear flashes of grunge, trap, and, yes, reggae—its arrangements could work fine as royalty-free background music for content creators. The Martin/Swift touchstone that’s most often recalled is the most simplistic one: “Bad Blood,” with its jock-jam drumbeat telling, not showing, the listener that they’re having fun.
Swift’s songwriting isn’t pushing ahead either. Old tricks abound: perspectives switching between verses; high harmonies adding drama to a song’s final chorus. Lyrically, she tends to restate familiar themes in crasser terms than ever before. The ballad “Eldest Daughter” describes internet toxicity in the same way as an anti-bullying PSA: “Every joke’s just trolling and memes / Sad as it seems, apathy is hot.” And yet she’s very much the troll on “Actually Romantic,” which disses another singer with as much sophistication as “I am rubber, you are glue.” “Wood” salutes her man’s anatomy in a similarly third-grade manner. Album after album, she’s inched toward more explicit sex talk, but lines like “His love was the key that opened my thighs” are so uninspired—neither funny nor specific nor even memorably gross—that they feel nihilistic.
The most interesting thing about Showgirl is the way Swift cops to the all-too-palpable sense that she’s finding it hard to care about anything. “Honey” is a successful bit of self-therapy about why she’s weary of pet names. The George Michael–quoting “Father Figure” seems to revisit the hoary fable of her publishing rights in order to portray her as a cruel mob boss. On “Opalite” and “Elizabeth Taylor,” she tries to reconcile her excitement over a new relationship with her many, many memories of heartbreak.
The cover of the album—Swift glaring in what might be a post-concert ice bath—suits the hardened persona she presents here. And the music’s blend of moodiness and poppiness calls to mind 2022’s Midnights, which had more staying power than it initially appeared to possess. But that album was barbed with intrigue; it captured a journey inward, as Swift tried to figure out the source of her restlessness during a seemingly settled moment in her life. Showgirl, by contrast, doesn’t raise or answer questions. Well, other than: What’s the point of releasing an album whose music seems so exhausted and on guard?
Likely answers include money, obligation, and strategy. Charitably, she really needs us to know how enervating her past few years were. On “Wi$h Li$t,” she fantasizes about having kids and being left alone, and Showgirl leaves no mystery as to why she’d want to disappear. She does perform one unvarnished act of creative generosity with the title track, which closes the album. On it, Sabrina Carpenter—Swift’s favored protégé—lends a vocal performance whose warmth and playfulness cut like a beam through fog, offering a reminder of how pop is supposed to make you feel. Swift clearly doesn’t want to play the ever-grinning showgirl anymore. That’s valid, but so is the impulse to listen to anything else.
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