During a record-breaking evening at the Grammys, Swift announced the upcoming album on stage. It will feature artists such as Post Malone and Florence + the Machine, with track titles including So Long, London and I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).

No less an event than the release of Beyoncé’s new country banger, Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album arrives with less musical bells and whistles attached but with four physical editions – titled The Manuscript, The Bolter, The Albatross and The Black Dog – featuring artwork inscriptions and an alternative bonus track apiece.

With The Tortured Poets Department, Swift has settled into her mellow thirtysomething musical groove alongside her regular songwriting collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, while the album title smartly references the teen angst on which she built her brand.

Knowing the lyrics will be raked over, she wastes no time in playing a blinder. “I was a functioning alcoholic, till nobody noticed my new aesthetic,” she sings on Fortnight a suburban soap opera which musically keeps the lid on the latent picket fence passions. Next, she second guesses the listener, dropping in a reference to a typewriter on the title track. In less time than it takes a millennial to look up said archaic contraption online, she wonders “who uses typewriters anyway?” Maybe the characters in the whimsical indie film this song could soundtrack?

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Classic and pop culture references follow, most intriguingly a namecheck for The Blue Nile on Guilty As Sin? lobbed in just as the album has succumbed to same old tame old business as usual – from the gentle picking at romantic scabs on Down Bad to the tasteful beats of So Long, London. Despite the exclamatory title and the presence of Florence Welch, Florida!!! is notable mainly for another quotable observation: “my friends all smell of weed or little babies”.

Elsewhere, Swift covers the art of masking on I Can Do It With a Broken Heart and shines a light on a common relationship delusion on I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can). Does it have to be so earnest though? At least, she gets to throw her head back and holler, accessing her witchy side on Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? Stevie Nicks, who contributes her own tortured poem to the artwork, would approve.

Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department review

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