Until recently, the characteristics that have defined a Taylor Swift album have always been in a state of flux. From the plethora of colorful country-rock fusions of 2012’s Red to the self-aware anime-villain theatrics of 2017’s Reputation, each of the singer-songwriter’s last few studio albums have afforded her, with varying degrees of success, the creative wiggle room to embrace a different sonic and visual aesthetic.
With 2020’s Folklore and its follow-up, Evermore, and now with her 10th studio album, Midnights, Swift’s template is getting a little easier to pin down. Not in a strict stylistic sense, mind you, as Midnights is far removed from the folk instrumentation of Swift’s cottage-core diptych, coming closest to mirroring 1989’s more uptempo electro-pop palette. Instead, Swift’s most recent three albums are united through their more matured temperament and the stark intimacy of Swift’s songwriting, with the comparatively scaled-back nature of her sound serving as a natural extension of this methodology.
The most notable example of this type of musical synergy is the hibernal “Snow on the Beach,” whose exquisite combination of plucky strings, chimes, and heavily reverberated bass beautifully evokes an early winter morning’s first snowfall. It’s a feeling that Swift accurately and plainly describes as “weird but fucking beautiful” on the track’s airy chorus, harmonizing with Lana Del Rey, whose ghostly vocals are minimally felt in the song’s sound mix.
Likewise, “You’re on Your Own, Kid” features a subtle, swelling harmonic progression built around Swift’s restless pre-chorus (“Search[ed] the party of better bodies/Just to learn that you never cared”) before she repeats the track’s idiom-like title as if it’s some cruel joke that’s been played on her. But it’s the following line that cuts much deeper: “You always have been.” The track’s backing instrumentation comes to a complete stop, and the silence is brief but deafening.
This isn’t to say Swift has totally forgone a sense of humor about herself, as there are still plenty of playful moments of self-depreciation peppered throughout Midnights. With its assertive yet peppy chorus, where the singer addresses herself as “the problem” in everyone’s life, “Anti-Hero” would feel right at home on Reputation, albeit operating in a far more socially respectable register than the bombastic “Look What You Made Me Do.”
The minimalist “Vigilante Shit” also carries a more reserved demeanor than Swift’s previous call-outs to her supposed rivals. While Swift’s not-so-veiled threats aimed at internet rumor mills might sound extreme—“I don’t start shit, but I can tell you how it ends”—her vocals slyly hang over a series of echoing, muted synth lines and stray arpeggios. On the twinkly “Karma,” she prays for the downfall of a certain “Spider-Boy” who’s the “king of thieves,” suspiciously sharing the initials of a certain well-known music executive.
Periodically, Midnights does run into issues of redundancy, which has more to do with Jack Antonoff’s deficiencies as a producer than with Swift’s skills as a writer and performer. His contributions here are uniformly clean and efficient, but plenty of his signature production tics, even if they’re presented here in a fresh context, are beginning to feel overused. There’s an excessive amount of reverb throughout the album, like the suffocating opening seconds of “Lavender Haze” that nearly swallow up the track, along with plenty of preset drum patterns (“Anti-Hero” and “Maroon”) and pitched-down vocals (“Midnight Run”).
Yet, approaching the album from this scrupulous angle prompts a question that lacks an easily quantifiable answer: What characteristics could accurately define what a Taylor Swift album should sound like these days? Folklore and Evermore felt innovative in how they rebuilt Swift’s sound from the ground up, but despite its own idiosyncratic delights, Midnights ultimately feels too indebted to her past efforts to truly push her forward. If nothing else, the album proves she’s unwilling to operate on anyone’s terms other than her own.
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I think the reviewer should take into accounts the context of the album. It’s an album right in the middle of her re-recordings era. In fact, all her songs of this album have sampled her older songs. The fact that it’s “ultimately feels too indebted to her past efforts” is a deliberate choice. “Midnights” is her reflecting on all those little vulnerable moments of her past life, as a way to get all her return feelings from doing the re-recordings out of her system. She literally just can’t help writing new songs from all those old feelings.