The Diary of a Showgirl is a triumphant pop victory lap

The final time we met Taylor Swift, she was spiralling.

Her final album, The Tortured Poets Division, was an emotional purge – a shocked submit mortem of two bitter, messy break-ups.

We discovered her at her lowest, “crying on the gymnasium” and “pissed off” at losing her youth on a six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn, that in the end fizzled out.

Eighteen months later, she’s again with the newest replace from her bureau; and the story could be very totally different.

Recorded in stolen moments through the record-shattering Eras tour, it finds the 35-year-old joyful, energised and newly in love with American Footballer Travis Kelce.

“This album is about what was occurring behind the scenes in my inside life throughout this tour, which was so exuberant and electrical and vibrant,” she stated in an appearance on Kelce’s New Heights podcast last month.

To seize that dynamic, she produced the album not together with her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff – whose pillowy productions outlined the sounds of Midnights, and Tortured Poets Division – however with Swedish pop masterminds Max Martin and Shellback, who beforehand labored with Swift on hits like Shake It Off and I Knew You Had been Hassle.

The purpose, stated Swift, was to make a decent, compact album of “bangers” (that is hit songs, not sausages) with “melodies that had been so infectious that you simply’re virtually offended at it”.

However sufficient preamble. Is The Lifetime of a Showgirl a rhinestone-studded success, or a refrain line disaster?

Getting straight to the purpose: It is a triumph.

It’s a mixture of compelling songwriting and whip-smart manufacturing that simply clears the excessive bar Swift has set for herself.

Followers anticipating a return to the maximalist pop of Crimson and 1989 may be stunned.

Swift’s new music is extra cool and picked up than her earlier collaborations with Martin; tapping into the atmospheric textures of his latest hits for The Weeknd and Ariana Grande.

However there’s not an oz of fats on any of those songs.

At 41 minutes, The Lifetime of A Showgirl is the shortest album Swift has launched since her debut in 2006; and the laser focus is a welcome aid after the bloated phrase soup of Tortured Poets.

Thematically, Swift’s newest lyrics have two distinct threads.

Half of the album’s 12 songs are about falling utterly, goofily, head over heels in love. The remaining deal with the seedy underbelly of fame.

Alongside the best way, we get some classics, just like the picture of a burlesque dancer “glowing like the tip of a cigarette”; or evaluating a critic’s barbs to “a toy chihuahua barking from a tiny purse”.

Elsewhere – and I am unable to imagine I am scripting this – there’s a complete music stuffed with playground innuendo.

The album opens, nonetheless, with a misdirect.

Followers assumed that The Destiny of Ophelia would tether Swift Shakespeare’s story of a noblewoman who drowns in a match of mania after being pushed mad by grief.

As a substitute, she sings about being “saved” from that destiny by Kelce, in a crisp pop monitor that is full of cute references to their relationship – together with the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs, and the quantity 100 (the sum of Kelce’s jersey quantity, 87, and Swift’s fortunate quantity 13).

“I heard you calling on the megaphone,” she says, acknowledging how their romance started with Kelce publicly declaring his affection on his podcast in July 2023.

“In the event you’d by no means come for me, I may need drowned within the melancholy.”

Musically, the music performs a intelligent trick by including an additional bar on the finish of each different phrase, as if Swift is lingering within the second, too swept up in her emotions to proceed.

The album is peppered with little thrives like that – and it is supremely satisfying.

The lovestruck theme continues on Opalite, whose breezy chords and Abba-esque harmonies unfurl like a blossoming romance; and Wi$h Li$t, the place Swift extricates herself from the Hollywood pack for a lifetime of home bliss.

“They need that important smash Palme d’Or and an Oscar on their lavatory ground,” she observes. “I simply need you“.

(Plus “a few youngsters” with “a finest good friend who I feel is scorching”).

However maybe probably the most eye-opening tribute to Kelce is Wooden – a staccato dance monitor, full with a Jackson 5 guitar riff, that is basically an prolonged double entendre.

Therein, we discover Swift superstitiously “knocking on wooden” that their relationship will final, and knocking wooden within the bed room, in an sudden homage to her fiancé’s “manhood”.

It is so foolish and sudden that I laughed out loud.

The identical factor goes for Really Romantic, a fantastically sarcastic monitor a couple of fellow pop star (unnamed), who calls Swift a “boring Barbie” and writes songs about how a lot they hate her.

Over grungy guitars and a slapping drum beat, Taylor taunts them with a contact of reverse psychology.

“It sounded nasty but it surely feels such as you’re flirting with me,” she trills. “All the trouble you’ve got put in, it is really romantic.”

She continues to settle scores on Father Determine – the scathing story of a backstabbing protégé, that interpolates the George Michael basic of the identical identify.

Followers will go wild making an attempt to uncover the topic’s id, however, to me, the music feels extra like a morality story a couple of music business Svengali, who possesses the facility to wipe out anybody who is not “loyal to the household”.

Filled with cinematic strings and disorientating key modifications, it sits alongside No Physique, No Crime, Unhealthy Blood and Vigilante S*** in Swift’s increasing catalogue of revenge anthems.

The album’s finest monitor, nonetheless, is the soft-focus ballad Break The Friendship.

Time-travelling to Swift’s highschool days in Tennessee, it reminisces a couple of boy she confined to the good friend zone whereas craving for a single kiss.

Delicate and nostalgic, it takes a heart-wrenching flip within the third verse, when Swift’s actual life finest good friend Abigail calls to say their former schoolfriend has died, and he or she flies by the night time to attend the funeral.

In an album that is largely involved with contentment, the remorse and unhappiness hit doubly onerous.

The gathering ends with the title monitor, a spirited duet with Sabrina Carpenter that doubles as a cautionary story about stardom.

It is the one music that basically leans into the showgirl idea, with a percussive tap-dancing interlude and ostentatious key modifications, as the celebs commerce traces about their cut-throat business.

“All of the headshots on the partitions of the dance corridor / Are of the bitches who want I would hurry up and die,” Swift sings.

Then the punchline: “However I am immortal now, child doll.”

That appears like a deliberate call-back to Look What You Made Me Do, written in 2017 when Swift was at her most embattled, following a public showdown with Kanye West and months of detrimental press.

Again then, she sang: “The previous Taylor cannot come to the telephone proper now… Why? Oh, trigger she’s lifeless.“

In 2025, with the world at her toes, Swift can lastly say with certainty that her place in pop historical past is assured.

The Lifetime of a Showgirl is her well-earned victory lap.