Thursday, April 18, I desperately tried to stay up for Taylor Swift’s new album drop. While it was dropping at only 9 pm due to our PDT time zone, I was still deathly tired. 

When I woke up the morning after, there was a surprise waiting for me. Swift released a second half to The Tortured Poets Department, The Anthology, at 2 am that morning, because of course she did. Dropping versions of an album has become routine in Swift’s releases as a cash grab that gets diehard fans to buy every variant of the album. 

I checked to see what people were saying about the now 31-track album. Many reviews from Swifties themselves praised her like she just ended world hunger. People posted videos of themselves sobbing their eyes out to the tracks. Some said they did not like it but will learn to love it because it is “the queen of pop” herself. Many were saying the Anthology was way better than what the original drop gave them. So, I decided to listen.

Initially, I began taking notes on what I liked and didn’t like about the songs. Fortnight (ft. Post Malone) was a very promising beginning to the album. It reminded me of Midnights‘ The Great War and Maroon, two of my favorite songs from her previous album, both registered as “synth-pop“.  I had high hopes for the rest of the album at this point.

…I gave up four songs later. My ratings kept getting lower, the lyrics were getting more and more incomprehensible, and the music was getting worse. Only a third of the songs made it onto my playlist after my full listen, such as Fortnight (ft. Post Malone), But Daddy I Love Him, I Can Do It With A Broken Heart, Guilty as Sin?, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, The Black Dog, and The Prophecy. 

The songs with important lyrics were not catchy nor memorable enough to make me listen again. And some lyrics were… interesting. So High School, presumably about Swift’s current boyfriend Travis Kelce, has the lyrics “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle” and “I’m high from smokin’ your jokes all night”.  Taylor has multiple albums focused on adolescence, but those were written when she was actually a teenager, not 34.

Down Bad’s chorus of being “down bad cryin’ at the gym” is supposed to be relatable somehow. This could be a reference to Swift saying she practices the songs she sings on tour on a treadmill to keep up with choreography, but it’s just so bad of a lyric.

I Hate It Here, similar to Speak Now’s vault track Timeless says “I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists”. Of course, she had to remind her fans that she hates racists, though most of this album is love songs seemingly about one she recently dated, Matty Healy. 

Taylor’s producer Jack Antonoff’s effect of cramming as many words as possible into songs was clear on tracks like the titular track The Tortured Poets Department. Swift sounds like she is trying to reach an essay word count. There had to have been a better way to say “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on / And that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding” Come on.

However, a few songs had elements I enjoyed, like the in-ear audio in I Can Do It With A Broken Heart that lets listeners feel like a miserable Taylor herself during The Eras Tour. 

I do understand why many praised this album, though. The lyrics on this album that didn’t make me cringe were very revealing about her love life. Many fans theorize about what happened with Swift’s longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn, or Matty Healy, or how her relationship with Travis Kelce is going. I am not very invested in that and just listen to Taylor’s music because I think it’s enjoyable and can relate to her more personal songs.

All in all, The Tortured Poets Department was mediocre and did not live up to her other albums. I expected an album with the lyrics of songs like the lakes and music similar to that of Midnights. All we got was every thought that popped into Taylor’s head over some repetitive piano. I would give this album a 2/10. To quote ‘tis the damn season, there is an “ache in me” from how bad this album was. And sure, maybe I’ll come around to the songs. I’ve found myself humming the chorus of Guilty As Sin? subconsciously. But it’s okay to not like every album an artist you admire releases. And this one is not making any top-ten lists for me.