On “Folklore,” a quarantine album made largely with Aaron Dessner from the National, she swerves away from her last few releases, embracing atmospheric rock — and other characters’ points of view.
The song that catapulted Taylor Swift from too-cool-for-country phenom to the-world-is-not-enough pop supernova was “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” the debut single from her fourth album, “Red,” in 2012. The first of her songs to top the Billboard Hot 100, it deployed country references as a tease on the way to an ecstatically saccharine, unmistakably pop hook — a universal anthem of I’m over it.
Right after the song’s gleeful taunt of a first chorus, Swift drilled down on just the kind of guy she was thrilled to be rid of: “You would hide away and find your peace of mind/With some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”
Sick burn. Delivered with an eye roll — literally, in the song’s video — it announced that Swift understood the power and cool of her own music (which was not, at that point, widely conceded). And it tautly encapsulated the way that mopey interiority has often been perceived as — make that mistaken for — depth. That’s about men, of course, but certainly about songs, too. It’s a trap that whole genres are built on.
Now, eight years later, Swift has made, well, one of those records herself, or at least something like it. “Folklore,” her alternately soothing and soppy, pensive and suffocating eighth album, is a definitive jolt away from the last near decade of Swift’s high-gloss, style-fluid, emotionally astute big-tent pop.
Made from scratch in the quarantine era, “Folklore” was recorded at her home in Los Angeles, and written and produced in remote collaboration largely with Aaron Dessner (from the National) and her go-to emotional extractor, Jack Antonoff.
Choosing this approach may be purely a function of circumstance, but Swift has been due for a rebaptism for some time now. “Folklore” marks a conclusion (temporary or not, it’s unclear) to her long march into the teeth of contemporary mega-pop, which over the course of four albums — “Red,”“1989,”“Reputation” and “Lover” — has paid decreasing dividends, musical and social. Becoming a true centrist pop star is a battle Swift never quite won, and is a battle no longer worth waging.
“Folklore” is the first attempt at a post-pop Swift, and it is many things that Swift albums generally are not: rough-edged, downtrodden, spacey. It is a completely canny pop album smothered in places by Dessner, whose production can be like wet clothing tugging at Swift, slowing her down, sapping her vim. Swift isn’t an especially powerful singer, though she achieves a lot with a naturally jumpy tone and enthusiasm. But both of those signatures wilt here as often as not. The tart edge that she specializes in — the one that’s viciously effective when taunting, or pining — is coated with layers of gauzy strings (there is plenty of cello), austere piano, throbbing Mellotron, smeared saxophone, atmospherics that thicken the air.
