No One Is Safe From Taylor Swift In 'The Tortured Poets Department'

The singer-songwriter is at her most confessional on her 11th album, a theatrical and acid-tongued reeling in the aftermath of heartbreak.

“All’s fair in love and poetry,” Taylor Swift declared as part of the surprise February announcement of her next project, fresh off winning album of the year at the Grammys.

Swift had come off a roller coaster of a year that saw the end of her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn and the start of her record-breaking Eras Tour. She entertained stadiums full of fans each night, seemingly tireless through a three-hour set list, while also managing to release two rerecorded albums. Along the way, she had a brief fling with musician and controversy lightning rod Matty Healy before she began dating tight end and noted wordsmith Travis Kelce, a celebrity pairing that seems widely beloved except by the Dads, Brads and Chads who were upset about the NFL giving her too much screen time.

Clearly, she had a lot of material to work with. And as Swift promised, all is fair game for her poet’s pen on her 11th album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” which was released Friday. (At 2 a.m. ET, Swift revealed that “TTPD” is a double album, totaling 31 songs in all, but we’re just covering the original 16-track album here. I love you, Taylor, but your midnight drops are ruining my sleep schedule.) The tumult, loss and lusting have coalesced into a captivating if uneven piece of work that succeeds most when Swift sets aside some of the album’s overly niche, wry humor and allows herself to make raw, honest admissions about pain.

There are great moments in the album opener, “Fortnight,” a boppy track where the singer looks back on a short-lived romance with both reverence and venom: “I touched you for only a fortnight/ But I touched you,” she laments. “I love you, it’s ruining my life.” Swift’s voice blends beautifully with Post Malone’s here, and I want to give it full marks, but puzzling lines like “I was a functioning alcoholic till nobody noticed my new aesthetic” keep me from doing so.

Her next track, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is reminiscent of “1989” vault tracks Swift released in October last year: verbose with a hint of ’80s influence. The title is clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, with Swift poking fun at her subject (all signs point to Healy) for using a typewriter and calling them both “modern idiots.” But it feels like this song wants to be two things — ironic and self-deprecating but also plaintive and earnest, as when Swift sings on the chorus, “Who’s gonna hold you like me?/ Who’s gonna know you, if not me?”