Taylor Swift

Lover

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.

Lover is definitive, a cornucopia worth combing through to find some of her best, some of her worst and a lot of her most interesting songs.

Lover is a plethora of things: a Taylor Swift genre sampler, an argument that Jack Antonoff is her best collaborator, a continuation of her problem with lead singles, and a collection of great synthpop songs, but the best part of it is that Taylor seems like she’s never been better.

Ultimately, Lover is overstuffed and meandering, but serves as a positive reprieve from her past struggles in the public eye, and represents an artist at the peak of her creativity, power, and—one hopes—continued romantic bliss.

While it never quite hits the musical heights of 1989 or Red, Lover feels like a necessary recalibration after Reputation. It’s an album that screams out for an editor, but when it hits the right notes, it demonstrates just why Taylor Swift is one of the biggest pop stars in the world.

On an album this long, there is equal room for good and bad, and you’re always equidistant from either one no matter what track you’ve reached.

As it is, Lover offers plenty of evidence that Swift is just a better songwriter than any of her competitors in the upper echelons of pop, but its something-for-everyone approach feels like consolidation, not progress, designed to keep Swift as one of the world’s biggest stars without provoking the kind of backlash that led her to start evoking the end of days in her diary.

Lover is a kitsch-leaning festival of humour, pastels, butterflies and the desire not to be defined by negatives. It is, in large parts, a hoot.

If Lover were about five tracks shorter, it'd probably be Taylor Swift's best album yet.

Throughout the album, Swift essentially lists the things she loves: her mother, her boyfriend and, let’s face it, love itself. While these are all heartwarming sentiments, they amount to a statement lacking any profound meaning, backed by music that struggles to make a lasting impression.