Taylor Swift’s Showgirl: Much glitter, little gold

Taylor Swift and host Jimmy Fallon during a deep dive of "The Life of a Showgirl"

Showgirl on the whole isn’t terrible; “it’s just nowhere near as good as it should be, and it leaves you wondering why.”

(Image credit: Todd Owyoung / NBC via Getty Images)

At a pivotal moment in her life and career, Taylor Swift’s singular capacity to connect with her fans is “beginning to falter,” said Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker. Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, predictably broke some sales records, selling 2.7 million copies on its first day and kicking off a weekend during which a tie-in movie-theater event topped the U.S. box office chart with $33 million in ticket sales. But during her economy-shaking 2023–24 Eras Tour, Swift celebrated artistic reinvention, and a lot of this 12th album, “from the production to the performance to the lyrical themes,” suggests that, at 35, she’s finally gotten herself stuck. She currently sits at the top of the music world. After many failed relationships, she’s about to marry football star Travis Kelce. But she’s more “cloistered” by her wealth and fame than ever, and almost every song she’s written here grouses about celebrity’s pitfalls.

Showgirl isn’t helped by a soft-rock sound that “floats in one ear and out the other,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Swift’s reunion with studio wizards Max Martin and Shellback, who turned her into a pop icon with the albums 1989 and Reputation, yields “just one killer chorus,” on the song “Elizabeth Taylor.” Elsewhere, Swift rehashes her beefs with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West on “Cancelled!” and kneecaps label executive Scott Borchetta on “Father Figure,” which interpolates George Michael’s 1988 hit. On “Actually Romantic,” she apparently targets Charli XCX for insulting her, comparing the Brat singer to a Chihuahua yapping at her from a tiny purse. But eviscerating rivals when you’re as huge as Swift is “by default, punching down.” And then there’s the “clanging misstep” of “Wood,” which aims for playfulness when it likens Kelce’s penis to a magic wand and redwood tree. Showgirl on the whole isn’t terrible; “it’s just nowhere near as good as it should be, and it leaves you wondering why.”

On first listen, at least, it’s “a thrill” to hear more of Swift, Martin, and Shellback’s “lush yet ruthlessly precise ear candy,” said Jon Pareles in The New York Times. “Every track revels in multilayered vocals, deployed in constantly changing ways.” But as you listen more closely a second or third time, the sour lyrics “undermine those pop satisfactions.” Really, “how many scores does Swift still need to settle?” On the final song, which is also the album’s title track, pop’s reigning alpha figure delivers a duet with Sabrina Carpenter that tells the story of a singer who refuses to abandon her career dreams and winds up a wounded, hard-headed star, buried in applause. By including that moment, Swift is establishing both “her distance and her control of the narrative.” As for the rest of us? “We’re in the bleachers.”