Swift’s 11th studio album has already shattered records, but the critical consensus is more complicated.
If you have been living under a rock, you may have missed that Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album, The Tortured Poet’s Department, dropped last week, catapulting the pop star back to the top of the charts where she, as of Monday afternoon, claimed all 10 of the top spots on both Apple Music and Spotify’s most-streamed songs.
While the latest record, 16 tracks plus a companion LP featuring 15 more that was dropped as a surprise, has received a large number of positive reviews, not all of the criticism has been glowing.
Of course, no one artist can or should be expected to placate everyone, and Swift’s massive popularity speaks for itself. Some of the less positive reviews have noted that Swift has set the bar for her own work so high that it would be simply impossible to clear it time and time again.
Here are some of the harshest early critiques of Tortured Poets.’Could use an editor’
Lindsay Zoladz, writing for the New York Times, began her review by praising both the album’s title track and its opener, a duet with the rapper Post Malone, as « potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. »
But Zoladz goes on to criticize the full body of work as « unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose, » suggesting the album was bloated and not among the star’s best.
