Many Small Hands

For the last 18 months I’ve suffered with intrusive thoughts, something which has created a strange disconnect in my life to the point where I can feel like my brain is not really under my control and, for the past few months, is often actively hostile towards me. It’s disorienting and frightening and this record, something that I discovered right at the peak of their worst iteration, is possibly the thing I’ve heard that speaks to the experience of them most closely. While the album has a lot to offer musically, my initial connection to it was dominated by the vocals. Sandra Ternoven’s voice is weirdly childlike but never really childish, a kind of affected coo with a deep sense of alienation built in. Juuso Malin’s low growl underneath only helps to confirm the idea of there being some kind of unusual creature singing these songs, one that’s playing at being a real human but never quite managing to pull it off. 

Over recent months I’ve often found myself reaching for the idea of who I am but finding that it’s not quite there anymore. “Are you even real?’ they sing repeatedly on Deep Fried and it’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot. The creepiness of the voice was something I found quite triggering at first, its uncanniness making these songs feel distinctly eerie, but as time has gone on the sense that I get from it now is that the singer is just lost, an idea that feels somehow more reassuring. “I need to be weird for the next few years”, Ternoven sings on Mermaid and in lighter moments like this there’s a sense of an artist showing fragments of a personality that they aren’t always able to bring to light. At other times there’s more a sense of drowning in the chaos: as she says later on, “put a pillow on my face yeah?”

Musically, The Voices Are Coming Back is more indie rock than I’m used to hearing these days, esp with its driving basslines that hint at The Cure and New Order, but the basis tends more often towards the synthetic and much of TVACB is worked up in a surprisingly euphoric vision of pop music. ‘Pillow Face’ itself is a great example of where the absurdity of the project meets perfectly in words and music, its semi despairing narrative underpinned by a loopy and slightly manic bass synth that feels like its dropped in straight out of an 80s computer game. The strangeness here tends to be floated on something that’s essentially commercial in its energy, tho a little seedy and desperate in the execution. Single ‘Rat Girl ‘is a clear example: exploding into life with glittery synths, powered by an irresistible pulse just under the surface yet dominated by Tervonen’s vocals, a weird, breathy yelp that seems almost yearning as she portrays a character that doesn’t seem quite human but exhibits all those traits to an uncomfortable degree.  This sense of not being quite right is also seen in the occasional spoken word asides, usually bemoaning the speaker’s inability to connect or her lack of artistic inspiration, a personal steel trap which she finds impossible to escape from. In one of the most haunting moments in ‘demonlover’, she notes that “You can always, like, scream for help, but it's like I feel like something terribly wrong has gone down, only when chaos ensues do people listen” and that feeling of sitting on the edge of something alarming that also appears ultimately unavoidable is one that is esp resonant to me right now.

While much of my last year was dominated by very straightforward pop music (and this continues to be a big part of what I listen to), the start of this year has brought me to acts like yeule, jim legxacy and pearly drops, artists who blend a more skewed take on the genre with lyrics that touch on something more uncomfortable, sweetening the pill of crisis in a way that I understand. And while sometimes I still need to escape into Taylor (and her own world of paranoia of course), records like The Voices Are Coming Back make me feel seen a bit more obviously without retreating into indie rock whining. There’s something here that reaches for the surface whilst accepting (and fearing) its current inability to touch something quite so far away. Maybe we’ll all get there in the end.

I actually refused to listen to The Life Of A Showgirl til about two months after it came out. Not because I don’t like Taylor or didn’t like the songs that I’d heard, but because the din around this album had become so deafening that I felt I would be unable to separate the record from all of its ridiculous discourse. This is not a new phenomenon with Taylor Swift: in retrospect I think we can call peak Taylor at 1989 Taylor’s version, a moment when the popular press still felt inclined to be nice to her despite it becoming clear that we were getting towards saturation point. 2024’s understated The Tortured Poets Department felt a little underdone in the production but, as far as I could tell, its bigger crime was to sound notably like a Taylor Swift album: lovelorn, dramatic, a little gushing in her usual way but - with its emphasis on the fallout from a romance that had been seemingly built to last -  also an extremely adult sort of record and as such, very much of a piece with the more highly acclaimed Folklore and Midnights, tho perhaps wearing out the welcome of that formula. However, so much of the conversation surrounding it failed to engage much with the content at all, instead taking the kind of braying, hyena like tone that generally signifies that a successful woman is about to come crashing down in public. Ofc it was to no avail: TTPD was bigger than The Bible and so we move on to the next act. 

TLOAS is designed to be bigger, brighter and more accessible than its predecessor, rooted in joy rather than misery and - with Max Martin and Shellback returning to the helm - given their full pop juggernaut production for the first time since 2017’s Reputation. In this I think it largely succeeds, tho perhaps not in the ways you might have anticipated. For all the clatter of their previous collaborations, Showgirl is a much softer record. It’s one that’s still notably of a piece with the rest of her recent work, occupying a kind of halfway house between peak era Taylor and her cosier, more sombre 30s. The warm, melancholy soft rock of 'Ruin the Friendship' sounds a little like classic Fleetwood Mac, whilst wistful chart topper 'Opalite' has something of Abba’s notion of channeling the 60s thru the 70s to it. They also have a similar sense of melodic joy but that’s perhaps more about the talents they share than any sense of imitation (something actually reserved for the choral, “I Have A Dream”-esque bridge in sober ballad Eldest Daughter)

The feeling here is welcoming but not necessarily cheerful. Showgirl is almost always a very easy listen but there’s usually a sense of anxiety in the air too, whether its on 'Opalite’s pleading notion of “a temporary speed bump” or the persistent critics who prod at her throughout 'Honey', cancelled out by a lover’s fond voice but still very much in the front of her mind. Indeed, when not singing the praises of new love Travis Kelce, Taylor can’t help throwing a few pot shots around, something that’s created some controversy (it’s hard not to notice how much her anger gets policed these days) but is perhaps unsurprising for a woman twds whom the world now seems incapable of acting normally. Often the subjects are no mystery: 'Father Figure' seems like a pretty straightforward pop at Scooter Braun in the wake of their long running (and finally resolved) dispute over her mastertapes. Braun is cast as a manipulative mafioso who’s power can only be bought by absolute loyalty to ruthless career goals, a notable sketch given how much Taylor herself is often accused of cleaving to the same mercenary ends (EDIT: actually i think it's about her first label boss Scott Borchetta, which i momentarily forgot and shows how much i know). It’s one of the weaker songs here for me, tho her unsubtle battering of Charli XCX on 'Actually Romantic' is more successful if you can get past the classlessness of it all and just revel in her glorious bitchiness. 'Cancelled!' is similarly a double edged sword: on one hand wallowing in a kind of self pity that’s perhaps too unattractive to return to quite so often, but also hilariously campy and with a melodramatic flair that wears her current critical pariah status with gushing pride. The bluntness of lines like “welcome to my underworld, where it gets quite dark” hardly make for high poetry but ofc they aren’t meant to: people criticising the lyrics on this record have rarely seemed to operate entirely in good faith and the material here generally works better than the waffly streams of consciousness that marred parts of her previous two albums, feeling a lot more memorable and emotive for their lighter touch.

And ofc there are tunes. The (again much criticised) 'Wood', full of goofy double entendres and prim but frank sexuality, may not feel as loose a sex bop as someone like Sabrina Carpenter is capable of but tbh I feel like that makes its message all the more touching. This kind of subject matter has rarely been something Taylor has felt comfortable placing front and centre and the kind of silly jokes and mild clunkiness that pepper the lyrics - the matter of fact tone in which she sings “his love was the key to open my thighs” is entirely hilarious - make me warm to her within that tension, a desire to talk about powerful feelings but ones that she doesn’t quite have the language to express. Indeed, for all its posturing, 'Wood' comes off as a deeply romantic song, its liberation more freeing for being part of a wider commitment, and as ever it has a chorus for the ages, with its clipped 70s strut underpinning one of her finest melodies. 'Honey' too is similarly gorgeous, the dancing harmonies and soft demeanour disguising another moment where Taylor sets herself and Travis against a hostile world (a theme that she returns to again and again). But the warmth with which she addresses her relationship is entirely charming and the way she drawls the title out just before every chorus feels like a classic Taylor moment being born before our eyes.

In truth The Life Of A Showgirl isn’t Taylor’s best album: it lacks the full throated musical punch of her mid 10s classics or the surprise about turns that have marked the biggest moments of her career. But it is the sound of the artist doing one of the things she does best: writing brilliant pop songs about love, betrayal and revenge in a way that’s gloriously catchy and surprisingly relatable, while simultaneously showing us enough of the Taylor underneath to make this a worthwhile dive into her increasingly brittle character. Much criticism to my mind seems to be focused on the idea that we’re all a bit bored with that: we don’t need to hear from this privileged and wealthy celebrity, still obsessed with nursing her terminally ancient grudges whilst the wider world slips into crisis. This may well be the case for many people, especially if they never liked her to start with, and ofc I can see that the week upon week of saturation coverage in recent years would eventually take a toll on people's levels of indulgence. But to take that out on The Life Of A Showgirl feels like a category error and one that misreads the most interesting aspects of its creator, namely that Taylor Swift, fully in charge of her talents, remains a fascinating and deeply strange individual: steeped in both romance and hatred, endlessly ambitious but also fundamentally idealistic, observing a world that she’s shaped around herself - perhaps more than any other celebrity alive - but still unable to find a comfortable place within it. The Life Of A Showgirl speaks to all of that and more and is still packed with some of the best songs you’ll hear all year. And yes, it was bigger than The Bible. Again.