Billed as an album of dark nights of the soul, Midnights finds this most forensic chronicler of the heart reflecting on her past, wondering what might have been different. Breaking with the hazier, more pastoral sound of her last two albums, Midnights most often finds Taylor Swift back in the city, surveying the house party, some R&B moves to the fore: a shoutout to Janet Jackson on Snow on the Beach, Swift’s underpowered duet with Lana Del Rey, and times when brazen Auto-Tune moves the aesthetic forward. One blistering track, Vigilante Shit, could have come from Reputation (2017), the singer’s hard-as-nails riposte to her monstering by Kanye West, by way of Billie Eilish.
And yet, despite beats, synths and a signature “old Taylor” shout (“Nice!”), this is a return to pop that’s content to remain relatively subdued. In this smudged, low-lit headspace, Swift’s perspectives carousel round like a zoetrope. She revels, Lover-style, in current bliss (Lavender Haze, Sweet Nothing). But there are notches on her bedpost Swift can’t help but run her finger over, one a “meteor strike”, another “a real fucking legacy”. Most fascinating of all is her darkest self-flagellation (Anti-Hero, Mastermind), where she dreams about being murdered by family for her money, and confesses simultaneously to “machiavellian” scheming and being “too soft” for “all of it”.
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