It’s been two years since Taylor Swift released Evermore - her second album of folk-pop that she released that year.
She’s taken a little longer on the follow-up, but has hardly been sat on her laurels, re-recording her earlier albums following the bitter dispute with music manager Scooter Braun after he acquired the masters to her first six releases after buying her former record label for a reported £237m.
Revisiting those earlier albums appears to have influenced the sound of Midnights, her tenth album, which see the US star embracing a more electronic sound, closer to previous releases, 1989 or Reputation.
It’s paid off, with critics (almost) universally praising the release. Here’s what they had to say...
The Guardian (5 stars)
Midnights delivers her firmly from what she called the “folklorian woods” of her last two albums back to electronic pop. There are filtered synth tones, swoops of dubstep-influenced bass, trap and house-inspired beats and effects… It’s an album that steadfastly declines to deal in the kind of neon-hued bangers that pop stars usually return with, music brash enough to cut through the hubbub. The sound is misty, atmospheric and tastefully subdued.
It’s an album that’s cool, collected and mature. It’s also packed with fantastic songs and at a slight remove from everything else currently happening in pop’s upper echelons. As ever, you wouldn’t like to predict what Taylor Swift will do next, but what she’s doing at the moment is very good indeed.
The Independent (5 stars)
Playing Midnights will make you feel as though you’re sleeping over at her house while she spills secrets and settles scores into the night. Over a series of murky electronic grooves (mostly co-written with Jack Antonoff), the pop star unpacks her darkest dreams, deepest doubts and cruellest thoughts. All the while she keeps things just cryptic enough to keep the tension crackling and the speculation buzzing.
The subtle melodies of Midnights take time to sink their claws in. But Swift’s feline vocal stealth and assured lyrical control ensure she keeps your attention. Turn the lights off and let these songs prowl around you. Just don’t expect their meanings to settle too biddably into your lap. Swift’s always as elusive as she is allusive.
NME (4 stars)
This we know, for sure: she’s never been one to stick to any specific sound, with experimentation and musical left-turns a recurring theme… The country roots she revisited on her re-recorded albums is nowhere to be found, and folk influences of her lockdown projects are largely absent. Instead she spins these new stories through sleek synth-pop, in common with ’1989‘ or ‘Lover‘, but the razor-sharp production of these albums is more subtle this time around. If the aforementioned is the album stuck on for pre-drinks before going Out-Out, ‘Midnights’ is what plays in the rideshare home, city lights swirling past when the night is winding down but you’re on the hunt for the afters.
The Times (4 stars)
Swift has said she intended Midnights as a concept piece based on 13 nights of troubled sleep, and these variously minimal, eerie, heartfelt and intense songs do have a crepuscular quality that is out of keeping with her usual cheery brightness… Sometimes, as on Labyrinth, the modish vocal treatments are off-putting, but in the main Midnights appeals because, for all its modern touches, it is essentially an old-fashioned singer-songwriter album about human weakness.”
Evening Standard (2 stars)
The surprise this time is not only that she’s paused her re-recording project to make something new, but that she’s prepared to disappoint anyone assuming that this will be a return to stadium-ready pop after two relatively low-key releases. The acoustic guitar is returned to the back of the wardrobe and electronic soundscapes are here again, with help from long-term collaborator Jack Antonoff, but it’s hard to spot anything that sounds like a smash hit on her third muted collection in a row.
So what exactly is Midnights? It most notably picks up where the pure pop triptych of 1989, Reputation, and Lover left off, a dazzling bath of synths complementing lyrics caught between a love story and a revenge plot… Midnights may come as a surprise to the most newly turned fans of her music, those who only learned to like her songwriting when it came in the traditionally respectable Folklore/Evermore package. But like many of her purely “pop” releases in the past, Midnights leaves more and more to be uncovered beneath the purple-blue synth fog on the surface. And maybe that’s part of her scheme to begin with.
The songwriting and the vocal performances here are so strong — she’s playing with cadence and emphasising the grain of her voice like never before — that eventually you stop caring what’s drawn directly from Swift’s real life and what’s not. It’s just a pleasure to get lost in tunes like “Labyrinth,” in which the singer explores her fear of falling in love again, and “Snow on the Beach,” a gorgeous duet with Lana Del Rey with some of the album’s most affecting imagery: “My smile is like I won a contest,” Swift sings in regards to a surprising new fling, and that’s all you need to conjure the precise picture in your head.
Midnights is out now.