Taylor Swift’s biggest bangers are clap-backs, shaking off the haters. Part of her charm is always managing to seem like an underdog overcoming the odds. So what happens when she’s on top of the world?
Her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, arrives just ten months after Swift finished the highest-grossing concert tour in history. In the UK, she has more number one albums than any other woman. Oh, and she’s engaged! To an uncomplicated American, Travis Kelce! So long, commitment-phobic Brits.
Swift knew this could be tricky. On “Father Figure” – a witty, crooning track which seems to mock her former label boss Scott Borchetta and interpolates George Michael’s classic anthem – Swift sings, “They wanna see you rise, they don’t want you to reign.” Last week, she admitted to worrying, “What if writing is directly tied to my torment and pain?”
Showgirl is not twisty and tormented; it’s meandering soft rock. The opening track, “The Fate of Ophelia” is stirring funk over heavy bass. “Opalite” has moments of doo-wop, recalling the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”. You can hear the Jackson 5 in “Wood” (as well as some dodgy allusions to Kelce’s penis). In the title track, Swift teams up with Sabrina Carpenter for a sultry slice of Broadway. The album is a joyful, 40-minute romp, but it’s missing the heart-thumping exuberance of 1989 or the tender poetry of Folklore. Swift set the bar too high. Showgirl is easy to like, hard to love.
The record’s most memorable moments have the sharpest teeth. “CANCELLED!” is a delicious drop of insouciance, where Swift shrugs and smirks “good thing I like my friends cancelled”. The diss track “Actually Romantic” is a thinly veiled swipe at Charli XCX. It’s a divisive song: musically because it sounds very close to “Where Is My Mind?” by the Pixies and lyrically because it goes in much harder than Charli’s “Sympathy is a Knife” (believed to be about Swift). These tracks are drops of bad blood in an album full of fresh air. And isn’t that, secretly, what we’re all listening for?
[Further reading: Capitalism (Taylor’s version)]
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This article appears in the 08 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The truth about small boats