Taylor Alison Swift was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, on December 13, 1989. She is an American singer-songwriter of pop and country music, Taylor’s songs about adolescent heartbreak were quite popular in the early twenty-first century. Her newly released album, Midnight’s is a suffocating vibe that celebrates a synth-forward intensity in the tradition of her pop triptych, 1989, Reputation, and Lover from this year.
Midnights has some of her messiest and perhaps most exposed lyrics. According to Swift, the 13 tracks on the album are all part of a concept. The tracks include Lavender Haze, Maroon, Anti-Hero, Snow on the Beach, You’re on Your Own, Kid, Midnight Rain, Question…? Vigilante s**t, Bejeweled, Labyrinth, Karma, Sweet Nothing, and Masterminded. After over a decade of increasingly high-profile collaborations, Swift’s debut album Midnights is the first to be wholly recorded with Jack Antonoff. In the past, he has used expressive, technicolor synth-pop to highlight Swift’s ambitious, vivid storytelling. If Swift is an avid self-portrait artist, Midnights is the first time she has permitted herself to modify her earlier work.
Swift seems to hint that these songs—these polaroids of many midnights—capture her precisely as she was when we thought we knew who she was by chatting with her former self. Swift has developed a reputation for penning songs about particular occasions in her life. Still, there has always been tension between her propensity for the diary-like and her reluctance to break down in front of the world. She aspires to make a naked confession in her lyrics, but what comes out is usually a polished interpretation of challenging feelings.
In Midnights, she has discovered a fine line between the posture of confession and the self-critical demands to be polished and put together. Swift won’t name names on this. Swift’s fourth album of original music in as many years, excluding the two reissues of her earlier albums that came out in 2021, is implausibly titled Midnights. While Swift’s fan base grew thanks to 2020’s “sister albums” Folklore and Evermore, Midnights appears to confirm that the two folkier pop recordings were a standalone chapter rather than a new, unwavering course.