Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, has arrived, with critics mostly praising the singer for releasing a tighter, funnier and more upbeat album than her previous.
On Friday the pop superstar said she was “so proud” of her album, writing on Instagram: “I can’t tell you how proud I am to share this with you, an album that just feels so right.”
Listening events were held around the world as soon as the album dropped. But much like several of her previous albums, The Life of a Showgirl leaked online hours before its official release, when some fans reportedly received their physical copies before the scheduled launch. Swift did not comment on the leak, but did pointedly like a video in which a podcaster criticised fans sharing the tracks prematurely as being “unfair” and “disrespectful”.
The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis gave the album two stars, writing that it “isn’t terrible: it’s just nowhere near as good as it should be given Swift’s talents, and it leaves you wondering why”.
But Rolling Stone awarded the album five stars, with critic Maya Georgi writing that Swift “shoots into a fresh echelon of superstardom – and hits all her marks”.
“Unsurprisingly, The Life of a Showgirl is a stark departure from last year’s deeply personal, prosaic, and tortured-as-hell The Tortured Poets Department … where TTPD was a greige and drawn-out in 31 songs, Showgirl is bursting with iridescent color and a tight 12,” Georgi wrote, praising the humour and edge in Swift’s lyrics.
For the New York Times, Jon Caramanica praised The Life of a Showgirl as “a catchy and substantive but unflashy album” that “takes the songwriting intimacy of her Folklore/Evermore era and renders it with more clarity and oomph”.
“Showgirl isn’t a hard pivot like Red or Reputation, risky-in-their-moment albums that expanded Swift’s musical palette,” Caramanica wrote. “Topically, it feels most kin to Reputation, but her collaborators aren’t slathering her in gloss or skronk here, instead letting her songwriting breathe.”
He did, however, call her track Wood – which contains unsubtle references to a certain NFL player’s “redwood” and “magic wand” – as “an almost goofy ode to a … reliable lover”. (Petridis called it a “clanging misstep”.)
The BBC deemed it “a triumph”, while Variety praised it as “contagiously joyful”; after years of albums about heartbreak, her constantly scrutinised relationship with Travis Kelce had resulted in an album “that stands as close to being an uncomplicated good time as anything she’s ever done”, Chris Willman wrote.
Maria Sherman at the Associated Press gave it four out of five stars but criticised Swift’s “dense vocabulary”, saying: “It is sometimes unwieldy, a common criticism of The Tortured Poets Department, like when she overstuffs ‘Our thoughtless ambition sparked the ignition on foolish decisions which led to misguided visions’ into Father Figure, momentarily overvaluing clever writing over clever cadence.”
Vulture, meanwhile, dissected whether the track Actually Romantic was a “Charli xcx diss track”, containing lyrics such as “I heard you call me ‘boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got your brain” and, in apparent reference to Charli xcx’s track Sympathy is a knife, “Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face / Some might be offended / But it’s actually romantic.”
“Sympathy is a knife is not really a diss track in the classical sense – it’s about Charli knowing she’s having unreasonable feelings when confronted by a more successful artist on what she thought was her turf,” Vulture wrote. “But on Actually Romantic, Swift is pretty offended by it anyway and has no such time for analyzing her feelings about Charli beyond her claimed lack of them.”
The estate of the late George Michael said in a statement that it was “delighted” that Swift had chosen to include an interpolation of his song Father Figure on the album, adding: “When we heard the track we had no hesitation in agreeing to this association between two great artists and we know George would have felt the same.”
Meanwhile, in reference to her track Elizabeth Taylor, the legendary actor’s former personal assistant of two decades said he thought she and Swift “could have been friends”.
“I don’t think there’s any question that she would’ve adored Taylor,” Tim Mendelson told USA Today, adding that he hoped the song would introduce Taylor to new generations.
“We couldn’t be more thrilled,” he said. “It’s a huge tribute to Elizabeth, and we couldn’t have asked for anything better to happen as a way of bringing attention to Elizabeth’s legacy to a younger generation.”
Friday will also see the launch of The Official Release Party of a Showgirl in cinemas, an 89-minute film that features the world premiere of the music video for the single The Fate Of Ophelia, as well as behind-the-scenes footage, lyric videos and “cut-by-cut explanations” of Swift’s inspirations.
Earlier in the week Spotify announced that The Life of a Showgirl surpassed 5 million pre-saves on the streaming platform – breaking the record held by Swift’s previous album, The Tortured Poets Department.
However, fans hoping Swift will hit the road with the new album soon may be left waiting: asked by Greg James on BBC Radio 1 whether she would tour The Life of a Showgirl, Swift said: “No – I’m gonna be really honest with you, I am so tired when I think about doing it again. Because I would wanna do it really well again.”
