8.8

GENRE: Pop   
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2022

The need for secrecy you feel when your affection for someone gets reciprocated is a very tangible feeling. Pocketing your urge to talk about the matter feels like the safest alternative: shielding yourself from your own sentiments will also avoid being judged by others. For Taylor Swift, that’s an all-too-familiar feeling. One of the most anticipated tracks on Midnights, her tenth studio album released with no preview or lead single, expands on the singer’s own version of internalized romantic exhilaration. “I can’t speak afraid to jinx it/I don’t even dare to wish it,” she croons over violins and synths on the ethereal “Snow On The Beach,” a song co-written and briefly co-sung by Lana Del Rey.

On Midnights, Swift is constantly surrounded by these tiny internal conflicts, the kind of thoughts that flash through your mind at 3 a.m., when there is no one to talk to and your voice sounds too loud inside your head. But once again, is Taylor Swift we are talking about, and she will always find ways to sprinkle some glitter over the most unwanted thoughts and make them glisten. Midnights seems to have unleashed yet another secret power of hers, one that makes it possible for her to interlace her insecurity and her self-confidence in the most glimmering ways, even when they get muffled by Jack Antonoff’s eerily upbeat production filled with crusading synthesizers.

By throwing some glow on her uncertainties, Swift makes her fears look incandescently bright, which is why Midnights can sometimes be deceiving, with its glossy melodies coalescing into some of the singer’s darkest moments. Take opener “Lavender Haze,” with its modular synths, romantic “oh ohs,” and lilac atmosphere: Swift makes a breathy love declaration and discusses finding refuge from gossip in the intimacy of her relationship with English actor Joe Alwyn. Then listen to the sultry R&B of “Maroon,” where Swift paints a picture of a couple living fearlessly in New York drinking screw-top rosé under the scarlet sunrises of Manhattan, on a track that sounds like a drunker version of her own “Dress” from 2017’s reputation.

At this point, you might think that Midnights will follow a narrative similar to the one on 2019’s Lover, with borderline cloying romanticism dripping from its edges. Yet, as lead single “Anti-Hero” starts playing, drum-loop beats and crippling synths lead the way for Swift to talk about her somber moments through sleepless nights and take responsibility for some of them. “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror,” she sings as the mid-tempo track becomes the record’s strongest yet, with its shimmering synthesizers and embellishing drums layered under her doubled second-voiced vocals—which is the closest any artist of our generation has ever gotten to recreating Stevie Nicks’s vocal modulations on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours—and a shrill bridge that leaves you on your toes, each new line sounding more thrilling than the previous. By then, you understand that Midnights is simultaneously about good and bad feelings: passion and yearning, appreciation for oneself and others, insecurity, self-loathe, and internalized anger, all connected by wires that intersect at each fizzing synth, untamed line, and pristinely-sung word.

Constructed over vintage synthesizers, clarinets, flutes, and saxophones, Midnights is a s synth-pop maze through which you are guided by Swift’s shiny contemplations of bliss, self-hate, and revenge. And there’s quite a lot of revenge to see here. “I don’t start shit but I’ll tell you how it ends,” she teases on “Vigilant Shit,” a sexy, trap-influenced track with blaring synths and rapid-fire hi-hats that resembles Billie Eilish’s “you should see me in a crown.” Then on “Karma,” she weaves some angry but witty lyrics into some weird analogies. “And I keep my side of the street clean/You wouldn’t know what I mean,” she sings in one of the verses. “Karma is a cat purring in my lap ‘cause it loves me,” she croons in another. Both these songs put Swift’s songwriting in the second plan and even raise questions about her capacity to let things go, but they also allow the razor-sharp production to take center stage and ballast what might be her feeblest lyricism in years.

As the night flies and Swift can’t, for the love of God, fall asleep, she continues to spiral down the pipes of her mind. As if flash cards keep giving the next random thought she ought to spend the next 30 minutes poring herself over, what-ifs take her by the hand and don’t let go. On “Labyrinth,” Swift sings of letting her guard down while industrial sound effects wreathe and slurp over trap beats. “You know how much I hate that everyone expects me to bounce back,” she admits before the slightly psychedelic production at the end slowly fades away. On “You’re Own Your Own Kid,” Swift plays with pop-rock chords while singing of returning to her “Teardrops In My Guitar” days in the most Carrie-style: attending a ball in a “blood-soaked gown” and looking to find someone from her past in the crowd. Swift sounds as confident as a woman who traveled back in time while holding the wisdom from the future, yet her yearning survives through different timelines. “I touch my phone as it’s your face,” she warbles over a vibrating bass line.

Eventually, she finds solace in the silence of some nights. On “Sweet Nothing,” a song co-written by her boyfriend Joe Alwyn, Swift sings about seeing him as an escape from the music industry’s pressure. “To you, I can admit that I’m just too soft for all of it,” she croons directly at him over Wurlitzer pianos, flutes, and clarinets. In contrast, the final track on Midnights feels like entering a Tesla tunnel at full speed. By the time the chorus hits, there’s a brisk left turn, and the melody shifts unexpectedly, leaving you to hold on tight to your seatbelt while Swift sings, “What if I told that none of it was accidental,” slyly talking about her acquired fame as a calculated woman. It’s in the bridge, however, that Swift sharpens her pen: “I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ‘cause I care,” she blasts, echoing into the very Lorde’s Melodramaesque chorus once more.

Midnights poses the glint of 1989, the gutsy attitude of reputation, and the reveries of Lover, all of which are filtered through the succinct musical lens that Swift acquired when making her indie folk albums, folklore and evermore. It’s visible the singer has turned into a musician without fear of experimenting: she tweaks her voice here and there, pressing some buttons to make her timbre sound unnecessarily ridiculous at times, like on tracks “Midnight Rain” and “…Question?” You can almost imagine Swift asking Antonoff, "What if we did this to the beat? What if I sang with a vocal fry?” Most of the time, her vocal experiments work like a charm, and the synthesizers contort and slide down your ears almost imperceptibly, making Midnights a fast but repeatable ride you can’t get enough of. It’s Swift at her most candid yet, without the overproduction but with the successful formulas of her past pop records.

Listen to Midnights: