The cover of Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, depicts the world’s biggest pop star almost submerged in water in a pose inspired by John Everett Millais’s portrait of Shakespeare’s tragic heroine Ophelia, from the early 1850s. She has always known how to cause a splash – and the artwork is typically arresting and thought-provoking (and no doubt stuffed with the traditional Swiftian Easter eggs).
Still, for Swift to reference the godfather of English literature with her 12th LP is not necessarily a turn up for the books. She has, throughout her career, acknowledged writers from F Scott Fitzgerald to Kurt Vonnegut.
As with everything else in the Swiftiverse, the image and reference are anything but random. In Hamlet, Ophelia drowns after falling into a lake from a tree – a concept Swift has seemingly parlayed into commentary on the overpowering quality of fame. The topic is one she has touched on before, with her album Reputation, from 2017 – to which the fantastically hook-filled and effervescent Life of a Showgirl serves as both spiritual sequel and negative image.
Reputation was dark and brooding. By contrast, this album glows with warmth and a cosy joy. Swift has described it as an homage to the “joyful, wild, dramatic” aspects of life on stage. She makes that glamour explicit with the imagery accompanying the album, particularly shots of Swift kitted out as a Las Vegas showgirl. (In one set-up she wears outfits from the 1935 Cole Porter and Moss Hart musical Jubilee.)
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That spark of joy is partly a consequence of the career high to which she ascended during her Eras project, for which she performed a three-hour nightly spectacular that, even allowing for today’s outrageous ticket prices, gave punters lots of bang for their buck. But the real inspiration is her relationship with the American-football player Travis Kelce, a recurring figure throughout a record that basks in the syrupy haze of new love.
Where The Life of a Showgirl feels of a piece with Reputation is in the earnestness with which it grapples with celebrity. Swift released Reputation in the aftermath of her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West and the subsequent online backlash. Angry and wounded, the American sweetheart wrestled with public rejection for the first time, and Reputation was the cathartic result.
The framing device for this new album is Swift’s Eras tour and its triumphs and downsides. The image of the singer immersed in water is a direct reference to those shows – each night she would soak her exhaustion and cares away in a bath. Swift also used her spare time to fly to Sweden to reunite with Max Martin and Shellback, who coproduced Reputation, at their studio in Stockholm.
The duo are seasoned hitmakers, and their modus is very different from the more vibes-based approach of her previous copilot Jack Antonoff, with whom she worked on Midnights, from 2022, and Tortured Poets Department, from last year.
[ Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department track by track review Opens in new window ]
Swift has been upfront about wanting to switch things up after that more meditative album, a two-disc deep-dive into the greyest recesses of her soul that divided fans and critics. She isn’t quite rewinding to the primary colour of Shake It Off (another Martin-Shellback coproduction), but The Life of a Showgirl nonetheless sprints out of the gate with the glittering single The Fate of Ophelia, which pulls off the classic Swiftian manoeuvre of cramming in not one chorus but two against a cascading synth groove.
As a lyricist Swift has never been afraid to twist the knife – or reach for the bazooka when she feels it necessary. She does so again here. On Father Figure she transplants the chorus from George Michael’s 1987 favourite to a taut R&B ballad that reads as a riposte to the men who styled themselves as her mentors early in her career.
She mocks these men who chomp on cigars and – her words – boast about the size of their d***. But the song ends with a twist, as Swift switches perspective from that of these would-be moguls to that of the pop star herself. She is now the one in charge (the millions she earned from the Eras tour having put her in a position to buy back her back catalogue).
She brings the same scorched-earth quality to Actually Romantic, a playful diss track that circles a grungy riff. It’s aimed at an unnamed pop star whom Swift heard “call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got your brain”.
The internet has a firm idea of who it is about – and their ears will be burning this morning. Swift might point out that the singer in question took the first potshot at her last summer. Either way, expect social media to detonate when Actually Romantic gets out into the world.
The spite turns to sugar on the spectral ballad Elizabeth Taylor, where she tells Kelce that she would morph into an old-fashioned drama queen should their relationship ever unravel. That love then spirals into outright steam on Wood, an innuendo-packed slow-burner with X-rated nudge-nudge wordplay. (Fear not, Swifty parents: it will fly over your kids’ heads.)
[ All of Taylor Swift’s previous albums ranked, from worst to bestOpens in new window ]
Swift raises the temperature further on the peppy Cancelled!, which feels like the album’s answer to her song Karma, from Midnights, in that it’s supremely catchy. It’s a gift to Swifties who enjoy the pop star best in a crowd-pleasing setting. Amid the twinkle, though, the lyrics land their punches: the tune is addressed to a “cancelled” celeb who is guilty of “girlbossing too close to the sun” and having “too much fun”.
Sparkly on the surface, barbed just beneath, the fantastic Life of a Showgirl closes with the gorgeous title track, a duet with Sabrina Carpenter on which t
heir voices intertwine so beautifully it’s hard to tell them apart.
The song is a meditation on celebrity written from the top of the A-list. As ever with Swift, its trick is to take a topic that should be impossible to empathise with – how many of us have been simultaneously lifted up and worn out by fame? – and transform it into something charming and relatable.
