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‘Cringeworthy?’ 4 scathing reviews of Taylor Swift’s TTPD album: the 31-song, 2-piece record has already broken Spotify records and earned a 5-star rating from some outlets – but haters gonna hate …

Not everyone loves Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department. Photo: @taylorswift/Instagram
Taylor Swift finally released her highly anticipated 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, on April 19 – followed by a surprise second album on the same day titled TTPD: The Anthology with 15 additional tracks for a total of 31 new songs.
Taylor Swift’s TTPD double album has polarised critics. Photo: @taylorswift/Instagram

The album has already broken several Spotify records, per Vanity Fair, and garnered widespread acclaim from the music industry, with Rolling Stone magazine hailing it as an “instant classic” while The Independent awarded it a perfect five-star rating. Swift took to X (formerly Twitter) to share the glowing reviews.

But not everyone’s a fan.

Unfortunately, the billionaire singer-songwriter’s fan base can become quite, erm, spirited when it comes to protecting their favourite singer. Many have even gone as far as to send death threats to critics, causing one publication, Paste Magazine, to hide their bylines in an effort to avoid fervent backlash from Swifties.

Here’s a round-up of some of the harshest criticism TTPD and its follow-up album has received.

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1. NME: “Swift’s 11th studio album is surprisingly flat and, at times, cringeworthy”

Taylor Swift, once compared to William Shakespeare, is now accused of being “cringe-inducing”. Photo: @taylorswift/Instagram

“Above all else in her career, Swift has always found acclaim through her lyricism, and comparisons have gleefully been made between herself and The Bard (William Shakespeare). Speaking in February, she says that ‘I have never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on [TTPD]’. It’s surprising, then, that The Tortured Poets Department delivers some of her most cringe-inducing lines yet,” Laura Molloy writes.

“Musically, it’s an album mostly devoid of any noticeable stylistic shift or evolution,” she adds.

2. The Guardian: “Taylor Swift’s new album is about a reckless kind of freedom. If only it sounded as uninhibited”

Taylor Swift has drawn criticism for its lyrics and production. Photo: @taylorswift/Instagram

“The delulu era had found its soundtrack – or at least it would have if TTPD sounded anything like as feral and feckless as its themes,” Laure Snapes writes, referring to the online slang derived from “delusional” about unrealistic standards or beliefs.

“Since 2020’s Folklore and Evermore, Swift’s only co-producers have been Jack Antonoff and The National’s Aaron Dessner. TTPD largely bobs between their sounds, muting Antonoff’s gated Bleachers boom and stretching Dessner’s composerly intricacy to pop heights it can’t quite buoy. It drains the sparkle from both, and seems to beat a bruised retreat that structurally confines the lacerating lyrics.”

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3. The NYT: “On The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift could use an editor”

One publication hid the name of its writers to shield them from Swifties. Photo: @taylorswift/Instagram

“As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on Midnights, internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: ‘Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,’ she intones in a bouncy cadence on ‘Fresh Out the Slammer,’ one of several songs that lean too heavily on rote prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: ‘Florida,’ apparently, ‘is one hell of a drug.’ If you say so!” Lindsay Zoladz writes.

“Sylvia Plath once called poetry ‘a tyrannical discipline’ because the poet must ‘go so far and so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals’. Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of The Tortured Poets Department would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.”

4. Paste Magazine:Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!”

Some reviewers don’t think Taylor Swift’s new album is as poetic as she maybe hopes. Photo: @taylorswift/Instagram

A Paste Magazine writer wrote a criticism so vehement that they had to remove their byline from the article entirely.

“This is not to say that Swift being the most famous person in the world makes her immune to having multidimensional feelings of heartbreak, mental illness or what-have-you. But she has made the choice – as a 34-year-old adult – to take those complex, universal familiars and monetise them into a wardrobe she can wear for whatever portion of her Eras Tour set list she opts to dedicate to the material. Torture is fashion to Taylor Swift, and she wears her milieu dully,” the critic says.

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The critic also goes off about Antonoff and Swift’s lyrics in her album’s opening track “Fortnight”.

“Between producer Jack Antonoff’s atrocious backing instrumentals and the Y2K-era, teen dramedy echo chamber of a vocal harmony provided by out-of-place guest performer Post Malone, ‘Fortnight’ chokes on the vomit of its own opaqueness. ‘I took the miracle move-on drug, the effects were temporary,’ Swift muses, and it sounds like satire. This is your songwriter of the century? Open the schools.”

Taylor Swift
  • Taylor Swift’s 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, and its surprise companion TTPD: The Anthology, signal another round of hits for her, but has earned the ire of some critics
  • While Rolling Stone magazine called it an instant classic, another publication had to hide the names of its writers to shield them from the wrath of Swifties