Taylor Swift

reputation

She's playing for bigger emotional stakes – this is an album full of one-on-one adult love songs.

At their best, these songs have a fizzing, pugilistic energy that recalls Britney Spears’ brilliant, mid-breakdown, screw-you-all 2007 album Blackout. At their least appealing, they’re still decent pop songs, but they feel generic.

Reputation’s hi-tech digital sound pushes Swift further into the realm of plastic pop. It is an ear-bending assault of warping bass synths, head-smacking drum patterns and deliriously treated vocals.

Over the years, she has been portrayed by the outside world: as the girl next door, the geek, the romantic, the marketing genius, the victim, the snake. Add them together and you might just get a complete person. Swift isn’t denying any of those facets of herself. She’s not excusing them. She’s just saying there’s more than one.

While ‘Reputation’ packs heavy artillery that was almost entirely absent from ‘1989’, it’s actually a helluva ride.

It may not quite measure up to the heights of 1989, but whether she’s Old Taylor or New Taylor, there’s enough here to demonstrate why she’s still one of pop’s brightest pop stars.

The pop star’s love life and squabbles take centre stage on a riveting R&B set that carries her even further from her country roots.

Reputation is an oddly bifurcated creation, half obsessed with grim score-settling and celebrity damage, half infatuated with a lover who takes her away from all that.

It’s as 2017 an album as you could imagine: a numbing narrative space that blots out the real world, where facts are tidy and stories are digestible and everything feels good enough to keep you entertained, at least until the next thudding chorus hits.

On Reputation, the Taylor she's chosen to show us is one that's more confident than ever. Her adventurous sound is coupled with lyrics that are drunker and more sexual than ever.

Reputation showcases a grown-up Swift, that's for certain. But she can't yet shake the fabled girl-next-door persona she has always written into her songs, no matter how hard she tries to play the Bad Girl.

The midas pop touch that ran through 1989, on which she struck the perfect balance between her past and present selves, is lacking here; she’s sacrificed some of it for such a wholesale acceptance of current pop trappings. What’s refreshing about Reputation, though, is that she’s no longer holding the mask so tightly to her face.

Reputation isn’t the failure that seemed possible a month or two ago; it’s full of bulletproof hooks and sticky turns of phrase. But in committing to a more conventional form of superstardom, Swift has deemphasized the skill at the core of her genius.