The reviews are in.
After sending fans into a frenzy back in August with the announcement of a new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” during an appearance on then-boyfriend and now-fiancé Travis Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast with his brother, Jason, Swift has finally delivered the product, releasing the highly anticipated collection of songs on Oct. 3.
As always, fans are rushing to figure out the deeper meaning in Swift’s work, studying the lyrics to understand what she is singing about. Along with fans, the critics are also chiming in.
Below is roundup of what the critics are saying about Swift’s new album and their reviews. Scroll below to see how “The Life of a Showgirl” is being received.
Rolling Stone
With “Showgirl,” Maya Georgi with Rolling Stone says Taylor Swift “reached a whole new artistic and personal peak.” At the end of this review, Georgi comments on the album’s final song, the title track featuring Sabrina Carpenter.
“It’s almost as if Swift is passing the torch to the next generation of showgirls as she takes a bow. Could it be her final one? Well, no. This showgirl won’t be left for dead; she’s immortal now. ‘We will see you next time,’ Swift promises as an audience cheers. After all, despite the rock on her finger, Swift is married to the hustle — and with an album as good as this one, she might even try to outdo herself, again. That’s just show business for you.”
Billboard
Billboard’s Jason Lipshutz went all in in his review.
“The result is a collection of songs that are immediately engrossing and among the most affecting of Swift’s career, while also focusing on topics like Hamlet and suburban bliss. Call it Bangers for Adults,” he wrote.
“For the countless fans who have grown up alongside Swift, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ offers a settled, grown-up phase of the love stories that she’s been telling for decades — although the album doesn’t rely on clichés, or go heavy on the cheese.”
Variety
“On ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ though, love seems easy-fought,” Chris Willman wrote in Variety. “And the belief that it might actually be a breeze, instead of, like, the eye of a hurricane, makes for an album that stands as close to being an uncomplicated good time as anything she’s ever done.”
“It’s too late for Swift to have a ‘song of the summer,’ but this feels like the Album of the Summer — the calendar be damned. It’s giddy, funny, touching, silly, haughty and moving in about equal measure, but most of all, it’s got a sunstruck kind of love that besottedly seeps through the orange LP grooves and might even make you believe in romance again, too,” he added at the end of the review.
NPR
“For the first time on a recording in a while, Swift is having fun,” NPR’s Ann Powers wrote. Her voice has never sounded stronger, the collaboration with her studio mates never easier.
“Her lyrics may focus on how her romance with fiancé Travis Kelce brought her back from a fatal heartbreak, but the bangers that are the point of ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ trumpet another resurrection: Taylor Swift as Western pop’s definitive presence, the star that couldn’t be dimmed,” she added.
Los Angeles Times
Mikael Wood did not rave in his review, while comparing Swift’s latest effort to her last album, “The Tortured Poets Department.”
“As a piece of psychological portraiture, though — the framework, for better or for worse, by which Swift has trained us to interpret her music — this collection of expertly tailored bops falls well short of its predecessor; ‘Showgirl’ feels like a retreat from the vivid bloodletting of ‘Tortured Poets,’ which captured a woman whose one-of-one success had emboldened her to speak certain toxic truths,” he wrote.
Wood does conceded the album will result in several hits, but laments the lyrical unsophistication.
“There’s no denying that Swift’s lyrics about love here lack the kind of depth she’s mined in tunes thought to have been inspired by the dastardly likes of John Mayer and Matty Healy,” he wrote, alluding to a pair of Swift’s exes.
The New York Times
“Swift has been pop’s alpha figure for more than a decade, a spot she’s clung to ruthlessly,” The New York Times Jon Caramanica wrote in his review. “Showgirl” isn’t precisely a goodbye to all that, but it does cast a wary eye on her past while greeting her future with a glee that verges on the unbridled. It also serves as an implicit capstone to Swift’s career to date.”
Caramanica also couldn’t help but talk about how “Showgirl” marks Swift’s growth since earlier albums.
“A catchy and substantive but unflashy album, it takes the songwriting intimacy of her ‘Folklore’/’Evermore’ era and renders it with more clarity and oomph,” he wrote.