Midnights is about reflection, not reinvention. Taylor Swift has explained that at length, in her own flowery vernacular: These 13 songs are “a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.” The thoughts that keep the 32-year-old songwriter up late are the ones she’s spent nine albums excavating: the unpredictable rise and devastating fall of romance; the binary of the “good girl” and the “bad girl,” and the chafing of societal expectation (that “1950s shit”); and the uncomfortable acceptance of her own fallibility. Life, she declares, “is emotionally abusive.”
Midnights is Swift’s first album to be recorded entirely with Jack Antonoff, after nearly a decade of ever higher-profile collaborations. In the past, he has accentuated Swift’s ambitiously vivid storytelling with expressive, technicolor synth pop. Here, in accordance with the lateness of the hour, they explore moodier, more subdued hues. Built around vocal effects and vintage synths, it’s an understated sound more interested in setting atmosphere than chasing trends. On the mid-album centerpiece “Midnight Rain,” against a backdrop as crystalline as the titular weather, Swift examines the pursuit of career over partnership. Exaggerating her natural uptalk, the production morphs her voice into a dramatic slant: “He wanted comfortable/I wanted that pain.” The woozy “Snow on the Beach” sketches an image of strange beauty in twinkling synth and violin, as Lana Del Rey’s warm background harmonies add a welcome coziness. Later, as Swift hesitantly enters a new relationship on “Labyrinth,” the production mirrors the ice melting around her heart, each synth quiver a pump of new blood.
Building on the softly stuttering Reputation tracks “Delicate” and “Dress,” the album at times recalls the way the spare, hazy beats of Lorde’s Pure Heroine cut through the denser radio hits of the early 2010s. While it’s gratifying to hear Swift push her idea of pop beyond the fireworks of her pre-2020 material, the evolution can feel uneven. In her transition from the Americana-lite of Folklore back to sparkling synths, she’s also restored some of her more theatric impulses. On “Karma” she conjures her sassy, shit-stirring alter ego in a less vindictive mood, luxuriating in her rivals’ inevitable comeuppance. The ominous, wobbly murmur lurking beneath the revenge fantasy “Vigilante Shit” recalls Billie Eilish’s debut, though Swift’s attempts at edginess come across as a costume; she was a far more believable killer on Evermore’s murder-mystery ballad “No Body, No Crime.”