If there has been a common thread — an invisible string, if you will — connecting the last few years of Taylor Swift’s output, it has been abundance.
Her last LP, “Midnights” from 2022, rolled out in multiple editions, each with its own extra songs and collectible covers.
What Swift reveals on her sprawling and often self-indulgent 11th LP, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is that this stretch of productivity and commercial success was also a tumultuous time for her, emotionally.
— there was a second “volume” of the album, “The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.
Gone are the character studies and fictionalized narratives of Swift’s 2020 folk-pop albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The feverish “Tortured Poets Department” is a full-throated return to her specialty: autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.
Persons:
Taylor, Swift, ‘, ’ ” Swift, Department ”
Organizations:
Poets Department, Department