Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department review: a sharp, savage attack on her British exes

The wittily titled Tortured Poets Department may be the apogee of Swift's self-branded gossipy songcraft. Photo / Getty Images

REVIEW

The superstar mercilessly mocks ex-boyfriends Matty Healy and Joe Alwyn in emotionally insightful, icily vengeful breakup album The Tortured Poets Department.

Taylor Swift is the great influencer, the reigning pop superstar of our social media fixated times. The wittily titled The Tortured Poets Department may be the apogee of her self-branded gossipy songcraft, a musical Roman à Clef so densely packed with references to her own torturous love affairs with other beautiful actors, pop stars and sportsmen that it is hard to decide whether you are listening to a song cycle or a catching up with a soap opera.

On the simplest of terms, what we have here is a very smart, seductive, lyrically sharp set of smooth synth-pop songs about affairs of the heart, crafted with love, intelligence and passion – another hugely appealing addition to Swift’s expanding canon. But it can be hard to disentangle the hook lines from the headlines on an album that is not so much a blockbuster entertainment release as a global news event, to be endlessly deciphered, decoded and deconstructed from gossip forums to business pages.

So here’s my hot take on the over-arching narrative of the 34-year-old’s 11th original album, one she has described as a “lifeline” album she “really needed” to make. Although it features one sumptuously sad and gorgeous, lyrically forensic dissection of a fading romance with a depressed Brit on So Long, London (that would be actor Joe Alwyn, who she dated for six years, but sounds like she got over in about six minutes), the arc of this album is about a torrid and obsessive affair with a bad boy poet.

That would presumably be Matty Healy, the frontman for the 1975, who is likely to wince when he hears what she has to sing about how he ghosted her, let her down, broke her heart and otherwise failed to live up to basic standards of romantic decency.

The album’s stand-out track is the icily vengeful The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, on which she rails against the duplicity of her ex, questions whether he was ever sincere, and even burns him with a sexual double entendre: “Once your queen had come / You treat her like an also-ran / You didn’t measure up / In any measure of a man.” Impressively, the backing amps up with the tone of Swift’s vengeful rage, rising like a percussive tsunami to wash away her feelings. But the same fickle lover is disposed of with more gentle sorrow on brooding piano ballad LOML, an acronym for both Love of My Life and Loss of My Life. Some real heartbreak has gone into these songs, and Swift’s fantastic singing makes sure you can feel every emotion.

The album’s title alerts us to the artist’s poetic licence, and it is surely absurd to read songs too literally – even though that is inevitably what will happen. Indeed, Swift can’t really complain about the prurient obsessiveness of the coverage she attracts (though she does on the barnstorming Who’s Afraid of Little Ol’ Me), since she herself declares she is the only one who can “decode” her troublesome amour on a witty title track that references Healy’s tattoos, cigarettes and typewriter (he is known to write songs on an Olivetti) while mocking both of their poetic pretensions: “You’re not Dylan Thomas / And I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots.”

The Alchemy is directed towards her latest paramour, American footballer Travis Kelce. Photo / Getty Images

And it doesn’t take too much decoding of cheesy sports puns to work out that the album’s penultimate song, The Alchemy, is directed towards her latest paramour, American footballer Travis Kelce. “This happens once every few lifetimes” she gushes, albeit preceding songs imply that Swift’s commitment can be rather more fickle than that.

The Tortured Poets Department is effectively Swift’s breakup album. In terms of emotional insight and sheer singer-songwriter genius, it is not in the league of such heartbreak classics as Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Joni Mitchell’s Blue, but at least it reaches for such heights. Swift knows her way around metaphors and similes and delights in conjuring delicately cascading tranches of clever puns and dazzling wordplay rooted in real feelings.

The Tortured Poets Department is effectively Swift’s breakup album. Photo / Getty Images

Yet she chooses to deploy that wordy singer-songwriter style in a modern pop setting determined to lay radio hooks on thick. There’s an unarguable charm to the romcom country pop of But Daddy I Love Him and I Can Fix Him (No, really, I Can), the sci-fi synth-pop of My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys and Down Bad, and crowd-pleasing electro banger I Can Do It With A Broken Heart. But it is only when Swift stops trying to please everyone all the time and bares her soul and her teeth that she really draws blood.

On the thoughtful album closer, Clara Bow, she takes a stab at the entertainment industry’s obsession with youth and beauty, the lies and smoke it wafts over starry-eyed wannabes and its tendency to compare everyone to someone else. “You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it,” she archly notes. “You’ve got edge, she never did.” There are some welcome edges here, but I venture that when she is ready to stop feeding the American dream machine, that is when she will be ready to make her masterpiece.