On Friday, April 19, Grammy award winning singer-songwriter Taylor Swift released one of the most anticipated albums of 2024. Swift announced the release date of “The Tortured Poets Department” at this year’s Grammy awards. The double feature album includes 31 songs portraying the inside of Swift’s mind as she navigates through
lost love. This album release had many Swifties on their toes waiting, and ended up shattering records with over 243 million streams and over 1.4 million copies sold on the first day of her release.
Many songs on the album go in depth about Swift’s deep emotions of love during past relationships, one mainly being “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.” This song specifically dives deep into the meaning of being someone’s favorite “toy” until they break and end up forgetting about them and don’t want her anymore. The song represents the feelings of being extremely valued and loved in the beginning and then being used and discarded like a broken toy.
This album includes tracks with deep meanings, a new sound of synth pop and incorporation of drum beats that we’ve never heard from Taylor before. This could be her most relatable album to date due to the fact that she covers such sensitive past issues such as toxic relationships, while also highlighting her growth as a human being. Overall, the biggest upside is the pure melodic diversity of this album. There isn’t one distinct sound, but a nice mix throughout the whole album. It feels like we get a little bit of every era from “Fearless” to “Midnights.” This makes the album much more enjoyable for listeners. The most notable tracks are “So High School” and “I Hate It Here.” These songs really do a good job of highlighting Taylor’s previous work, and specifically paying homage to her country origins and her acoustic roots without overpowering the album.
However, the album is not perfect. With the most definitive downside of the album being the repetition, a lot of the tracks are extremely similar with the beats or the repetitive topics of relationships and their aftermath. Additionally, it feels like the album is somewhat forced and tedious because she kept repeating similar messages of hurting after breakups, and loss of love over the course of the album, which can make the album very hard to digest. Also, the album is over 2 hours long and includes 31 songs. Even for a double album, 2 hours is still a very lengthy album.
Overall, this new album deserves a rating of 4 out of 5 stars. No arguing Taylor Swift’s talent is one of a kind, but this album was not some of her absolute best work produced.
