they took the crown but it's alright

★★★★★

“Before this year I probably would’ve overthought when to release this music at the ‘perfect’ time, but the times we’re living in keep reminding me that nothing is guaranteed,” Taylor Swift posted on social media on Thursday. Normally a meticulous record release strategist, Swift uncharacteristically gave fans just 17 hours to digest the announcement of her eighth effort, Folklore, released just 11 months after her last album, Lover.

The early information provided an intriguing list of collaborators, including indie bigshots Aaron Dessner (a core member of The National, who co-wrote 11 of the record’s 16 tracks) and Bon Iver. Those names, coupled with the bucolic album title, brought with them a suite of preconceptions.

On first listen, Folklore sounds like a National record sped up, glossed with a sheen of reverb and Swift’s self-reflective lyrics that capture a single, fleeting moment. “I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn’t though,” she sings on opening track The 1. Strings and piano drench most of the songs, lending an ethereal quality to the record that floats the listener through its 63 minutes. The whole thing feels like a fever dream.

Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon steps in on Exile, a rich, textured track that blends two unlikely voices together in glorious harmony. The liberal use of autotune throws back to Vernon’s own Bon Iver, Bon Iver record from 2011 – it’s a strange mirror, as the first Bon Iver album was conceived in the woods after a breakup, and quarantine conditions give this record a similar isolated mythology. The effect is mesmerising, a whole world built in under five minutes. These moments build to climaxes and then die down again, creating a spectrum of sound and emotion across the album as Swift carefully catalogues her pains.

These sidesteps into indie-folk territory don’t stop Folklore from being a pop album and a good one at that – Mirrorball and August slot perfectly into the dream-pop genre, employing shimmering vocal reverb over a comforting aural blanket and Swift’s knack for catchy melodies and perfectly-timed key changes persevere.

Swift has been a master of reinvention across her career, and this album brings together all the threads, as well as adding new ones – Illicit Affairs, with its fingerpicked acoustics and soft horns, the banjo-driven Invisible String and the country-tinged Betty, harmonica and all, hark back to the days when it was just a girl and her guitar. In many ways, the record feels as though Swift is returning to her roots – there’s little trace of the mean-girl energy of 2017’s Reputation, or the sickly bubblegum cringe of Lover’s lead single ME!

There’s a feeling of expectations falling away, too – on Mad Woman, Swift drops the first-ever "f-bomb" in her decade-plus career, suggesting that despite the softness of this album, she’s developing her own steel. As the first album of her 30s, it feels fitting that Swift is putting boundaries firmly in place, both for herself and her audience – she’s more mature and measured than ever.

TAYLOR SWIFT