TW: eating disorder
It’s fair to say that Taylor Swift’s reputation (no pun intended) has been through the ringer over the past fifteen years. From Kanye West’s stage storming at the VMAs, to tabloid slander about her dating life, she has had her personality attacked from every angle, most eloquently and viscerally portrayed in the Netflix documentary Miss Americana (2020).
Since that documentary, she has taken the world by storm. Lover (2019) saw a more carefree version of Taylor Swift, leaving behind the anger and belligerence of reputation (2017) and replacing it with an almost ethereal atmosphere representative of someone who was (and is) very much in love. Breaking free of the shackles of her old record label and of her own self-doubt, the secret releases of folklore and evermore ushered in a new era for Swift that still carried the same heart but showed a different facet to her song writing armoury.
Midnights, then, had quite a lot to live up to. Where there had been no pressure on Taylor during the pandemic, fans now knew what to expect and when to expect it. The gradual release of the track list on TikTok via her ‘Midnights Mayhem with Me’ built up tension amongst the Swiftie fan base; when it was revealed that Lana Del Rey would feature on ‘Snow on the Beach’, this tension reached a fever pitch.
In classic Taylor form, she wasn’t happy simply creating a 13-song concept album, oh no. Upon the release of Midnights, she revealed the 3am files: seven more songs for fans to argue over and ultimately claim as their own slice of Taylor.
Now to answer the question you’re all asking: is Midnights any good?
In many ways, this album feels like a love letter to all of her former records. It feels like she’s taken parts of her vast portfolio and collated it into a hybrid record that draws on her past. Sonically, tracks such as ‘Bejeweled’ and ‘Cruel Summer’-esque ‘Maroon’ could easily be ‘From The Vault’ tracks from Lover, whilst ‘Vigilante Shit’ combines the lyrical darkness of evermore’s ‘no body, no crime (ft. HAIM)’ with the bad bitch energy of reputation.
Lyrically, Midnights is as clever and devastating as Swift has ever been. Drawing on her eating disorder in ‘You’re On Your Own, Kid’ (which could easily fit into the ‘cardigan’, ‘august’, ‘betty’ storyline from folklore, by the way), she effortlessly and pointedly attacks the media environment within which she grew up, making an important stance about how waist size affects your value in society: “I hosted parties and starved my body/Like I’d be saved by the perfect kiss”.
The most introspective, and therefore naturally the fans’ favourite, is lead single ‘Anti-Hero’. The chorus of “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me” is simple but effective and has quickly become a rally cry of Swifties globally. The real magic of the song for me, however, comes from the incredibly adept translation of what it’s like to hate your own reflection: “I’ll look directly at the sun but never in the mirror”. Again, this is Swift at her best: using the simplest of lyrics to convey the most difficult of feelings.
Opener ‘Lavender Haze’ sees Taylor (briefly) go political, making reference to her record label’s horror at Swift’s determination to make a stance against openly homophobic and misogynist politics from Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, refusing to stand for “The 1950s shit they want from me”. Critics have previously called her fake and accused her of playing the victim, but this underlines the fact that she is neither, ensuring that she stands up for her female and LGBTQ+ fans time and again even when it would be easier to just stay silent.
But…I can’t quite give Midnights the adulation I want to.
Midnights is sonically much more akin to 1989 and Lover in the use of synths and electronic beats, with the more acoustic elements of folklore and evermore therefore not really getting much of a look-in. There are moments where this is executed brilliantly, for example in ‘High Infidelity’, within which the instrumental adds to a feeling of disharmony and malevolence as Swift taunts listeners and lovers alike as she asks: “Do you really wanna know where I was April 29th?”.
Elsewhere, however, it gives the feeling of style over substance.
Clearly, it is important that the concept of sleepless nights and the thoughts that occur to you as you stare at your ceiling comes through, especially in the 3am Version. She certainly succeeds, with some of this album being near-incomprehensible. The promo photos and videos also don’t really correlate with the feel of the music, with the dark wood panelling and 1970s dress code not seeming to match the modern pop atmosphere that Midnights inhabits.
Where she is usually so good at painting a picture and taking the audience with her on a journey, it feels as if there are stumbling blocks in the way, mostly in the form of disorientating production choices and sometimes facile lyrics; Lavender Haze's "talk your talk and go viral/I just need this l
ove spiral" feels a bit like a fifteen year old wrote it. These moments are quite jarring, but I suppose do make you feel the confusion about reality that only comes as you’re drifting in and out of consciousness, so maybe it was all a cunning plan. But it doesn’t quite work for me. The concept sometimes appears to take precedence over the songs, leaving the listener cold at times.
If you were coming into this album having previously only heard her singles on the radio, I think you would assume this was standard for Taylor Swift. The nuance of lyrics that more interested fans pay attention to are lost under layers of pop-tastic production and instrumental fog that make it difficult to really decipher what Swift is trying to get at, certainly on the first listen.
The balance of more self-exploratory songs and those about love, whether it is being deeply engrossed within it or falling out of it, is slightly off kilter too and as such makes it feel sickly sweet at times. ‘Snow On The Beach’, which allegedly features a very elusive Lana Del Rey, is a case in point for this. Writing about that moment where two people realise they are completely infatuated with each other, a feeling Taylor and Lana describe as “Weird but fucking beautiful”, the song feels flat and like a step back to the more lyrically naive moments on Speak Now and her self-titled debut. At least the swears indicate that Lana was involved somewhere, even if her vocals have been tuned out of the final edit.
On the whole, then, this album is not Taylor’s best. It has very strong moments, with the folklorian ‘Bigger Than The Whole Sky’ being my personal highlight, encompassing the raw emotion that Taylor does so well and combining it with Jack Antonoff’s production skills that give it an almost unearthly quality.
Unfortunately, there are not enough moments that provide this equilibrium within the record. The concept maybe got the better of the team, or maybe just the sheer expectation made it an impossible task to create an album that all fans would enjoy. It feels as though this album doesn’t quite know what it is yet, like it is stuck trying to be all things to all people.
This is still a very good album, and I would always recommend giving it a listen. But, for me, it just isn’t her best.
Rating: 7.5/10
Must-hear tracks: Maroon, Vigilante Shit, Bigger Than The Whole Sky (3am)