Taylor Swift

Lover

For all of its rich production and lyrical complications, Lover has a simple premise: embrace gratitude and listen to the insights that emerge after a perspective recalibration. As always, Lover is an album Swift made for her fans. But it also feels like a record she made for herself, unburdened by external expectations and her own past.

Lover runs long, and despite a strong front half the album sags a bit in the midsection by design — a shame, since a sense of experimentation ebbs and flows throughout.

Instead of trying to be all things to all audiences, it plays to the strengths of a witty songwriter in love, eager to tell anyone who will listen exactly how she feels.

Lover is, fittingly, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But nevertheless it feels like an epiphany: free and unhurried, governed by no one concept or outlook, it represents Swift at her most liberated, enjoying a bit of the freedom she won for her cohort.

Swift’s seventh album feels like a partial resurrection of the Swift of old: moony romance and earnest earworms abound.

It succeeds in spite of its clunkier moments because Swift’s melodies are frequently dazzling and her loved-up lyrics are ultimately quite touching.

More than either 1989 or Reputation, Lover seems fully realized and mature: Swift is embracing all aspects of her personality, from the hopeful dreamer to the coolly controlled craftsman, resulting in a record that's simultaneously familiar and surprising.

Her songwriting is as careful, detailed and impressive as ever, she's nestled into a perfect pop niche, and it seems like being totally in love has let her head drift off into the clouds a bit. The best part: Lover lets fans wander off into the daydream with her.

The 18 tracks on Lover oftentimes slide together like a lot of beautiful puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit together perfectly.

Even though Lover’s production and visual marketing are the brightest of Swift’s career, the content of its songs show the songwriter at some of her darkest moments.

On her seventh album, Taylor Swift is a little wiser and a lot more in love. Though uneven, Lover is a bright, fun album with great emotional honesty.

Lover lacks a unified sonic aesthetic, ostensibly from trying to be something to everyone—the surest tell that it’s as much reaction as it is creation.

Ultimately, the album’s highlights are those songs where the voice and sentiment we hear is truly her own, the enthralling, stirring, emotion- manipulating voice that’s threaded its way through every album since her 2006 debut, not the voice that leans too close to what the pop music machine demands.