Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department review – a whole lotta love gone bad

(Republic)
On her 11th album, the American singer-songwriter picks apart her romantic travails in typically unsparing fashion, while her ability to turn sorrow into songwriting gold remains unparalleled

In a time of so many upended certainties, Taylor Swift’s 11th album arrives as a tale very much foretold. It’s no genre bolt from the blue like Beyoncé’s recent country album; it delivers not just what Tayloristas have been speculating about furiously for months, but more: a surprise second album, The Tortured Poets Department: the Anthology, dropped at 2am the night after the first album’s release. When the LP’s title was announced in February, and the track listing in March, the question was never if, but merely how hard, Swift’s most recent exes – specifically, British actor Joe Alwyn, but also Matt Healy from the 1975 – were going to be hung out to dry. As “William Bowery”, Alwyn had songwriter credits on three Swift albums – Folklore (2020), Evermore (2020) and Midnights (2022) – and it’s pretty safe to assume he is receiving a great many of the demerits here as Swift gnashes, accuses, mourns, self-flagellates, likens her time with him to a prison (Fresh Out the Slammer) and longs to be taken away in a spaceship (Down Bad) and calls for an exorcist (the sombre bonus piano ballad, how did it end?).

Speculating is, of course, all part of the package; a Swiftie-an safe space, you might call it. Her first song widely understood to be about Alwyn was London Boy (on Lover, 2019). One track here is called, pointedly, So Long, London; it doesn’t take an ultra stan to read it as Swift’s Brexit. It only gets messier from there on in. Healy is likely the subject of the Smallest Man Alive, probably the album’s sickest burn, and perhaps handful of other caustic putdowns.