‘The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology’ review: Taylor Swift’s latest is…alright

The Tortured Poets Department, the eleventh studio album from Taylor Swift, debuted at Number 1 on the Billboard 200 and became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single week. The question left to ask is– how good is it? 

The 31-track album has a couple of strong songs, but overall, it isn’t close to Swift’s best work. Many of the songs pick up on themes explored in her previous albums without taking them a level further. For instance, “Clara Bow” tracks her journey from a rising to a fading star. She comments on how being Taylor Swift will soon be less promising than being the next Taylor Swift. In “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” she tells the story of a lover who kept trying to pull her down, reminding one of “Mean.”

Many of the songs on this album is Swift telling a story. In some cases, it’s a story about the volatility and superficiality of fame (“But Daddy I Love Him,” “Clara Bow”). Some stories are about being unfairly underestimated (“thanK you aIMee,” “Cassandra”). Some are about being seen as and being threatening (“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,” “The Albatross”). In other stories, she chronicles the disintegration of relationships; Sometimes tumultuous (“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”) and sometimes long-drawn (“So Long London”).

These songs show Swift as a character in a story. The one who is famous, the one who is the underdog, the one who is in love, and the one who is not. But we’ve seen Swift tell such stories before, in rich and beautiful detail. Think of “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Mad Woman,” and “Death By a Thousand Cuts.” So, hearing the stories in this album leaves one wanting more. Not new stories, but different ways of looking at these ones. And in some songs, Swift gives us a glimpse of what that might look like.

For instance, in “The Prophecy,” Swift taps into a moment of desperation where the narrator is begging for her fate to be altered: “Please/I’ve been on my knees/Change the prophecy.” Swift is at one of her bests when she charts out the contours of an emotion in all its specificity and vulnerability. This song evokes the image of a woman sunk to her knees, with her pleas and grief pooling around her wider and wider with every verse. This song is also self-reflective, as she comments “A greater woman stays cool/But I howl like a wolf at the moon.” The strong suit is that Swift doesn’t pull her narrator out of this and into a larger story. Her narrator has been condemned to a feeling of helplessness, stuck in this moment. And the listener is condemned to this moment right alongside her.

In “The Prophecy,” it’s not a story we’re getting to see, it’s Swift. Some other songs where we get hints of this are “I Look in People’s Windows” and “Guilty as Sin.” But few are the songs where Swift is not telling a story about herself, and simply being herself, beyond the limits of her narrative.

Like any Taylor Swift album, this one also has catchy pop tunes. For example, take the bridge of “So High School” and the chorus of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” The latter is one of the stronger pop songs of the album. The instrumentals are similar to “Bejeweled,” almost as if suggesting that she is still bejeweled, even with a broken heart. The lyric video, set to clips from the Eras Tour, only amplifies the sentiment of the song. It drives the point home that she has performed at her best even while being at personal lows.

The album toys around creatively in other ways as well. For instance, she reveals “loml” to be an abbreviation of “loss of my life”. In “How Did It End?” she plays with the children’s rhyme “sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G” by turning it to “Sitting in a tree/D-Y-I-N-G”. Yet, these do not set the trend of the album, but stand out against it as the more interesting songs.

Overall, this album could have been stronger. By committing wholeheartedly to being an intimate portrayal of the narrator’s inner world, or to being a catchy pop record. However, as it stands, it falls short of both. I am wishing we got more.