Sign In to rate and review
CRITIC REVIEWS
80
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.
80
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.
80
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.
80
While ‘Reputation’ packs heavy artillery that was almost entirely absent from ‘1989’, it’s actually a helluva ride.
80
She's playing for bigger emotional stakes – this is an album full of one-on-one adult love songs.
80
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.
80
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.
80
An album full of cryptic love songs and kiss-offs that beg further exploration, sprinkled with irresistible hooks and wrapped up in glistening production.
80
It's Swift's willingness to portray herself not as a victim, but the villain of her own story that makes Reputation such a fascinatingly thorny glimpse inside the mind of pop's reigning princess.
80
The melodies are so glossy-haired and bright eyed, you suspect eugenics; and the production by Jack Antonoff, Max Martin and Shellack is state-of-the-art.
75
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.
75
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.
70
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.
70
Gratefully, nothing on Reputation sounds like “LWYMMD.” In fact, after releasing a single that sounds as far away from her 2006 self-titled country-labeled debut as humanly possible, Taylor Swift on Reputation sounds more like herself than she has since 2012’s Red.
70
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.
70
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.
70
Taylor Swift, once country music’s teen dream, is growing up and so is her fan base. They’re drinking whiskey and done playing nice. And despite some growing pains, most listeners can have a good time with the new Taylor.
65
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.
60
reputation's best tracks are those which undermine its central conceit.
60
Not everything on the record is a winner, but it has enough glimpses of magic that it is certainly worth the dive.
60
Reputation is the boring screaming gesture on behalf of a marketing fleet, an advertisement reaching out expecting your righteous empathy.
60
Intimate, self-serving, seductive and wildly uneven, Reputation is a Magic Eye puzzle. If you look at it just right, several excellent pop songs emerge from a cluttered picture.
2mo
60
Sometimes overly busy album. ... Swift soars when she is most herself.
Print Only
1y
60
In many ways, Reputation is a failure. But fucking up until you find something that works is what being 27 is all about. In that respect, Reputation is the only album its creator could have made.
60
Swift’s unencumbered analysis of the tectonic shifts within her personal and public life are equal parts razor sharp and self-indulgent. But as a pop album, ‘Reputation’ is never revolutionary, the adrenalin rush heady but ultimately short-lived.
60
It's not a game-changer, but it's also far from a disaster. Remove that EDM gossamer, and you're left with a solid, flawed little pop album, end of story.
60
It's difficult not to read Reputation as Swift's first self-consciously "adult" record, one preoccupied with sex, betrayal, and the scars they leave behind. Appropriately, she dresses Reputation in dark, moody sounds, dwelling on drum loops and synthesizers.
58
Taylor Swift’s newest release Reputation is the hypothetical pop album we once feared. Here she is, an artist on the defense, an expert singer-songwriter struggling to grasp at current trends that may not be beyond her reach, but also don’t suit her particular talents.
40
Swift might have transformed into the popular girl, but by all accounts, she’s still stuck in high school. Unfortunately for her, many fans are over it.
40
Taylor Swift’s Reputation isn’t a complete car wreck, but it is a hapless, facetious and an unconvincing attempt at making a whole generation familiar with a well-mannered pop star suddenly believe she’s got a heart of stone.
40
Reputation focuses more on the pop star narrative than it does actual pop songs.
33
With Reputation, Swift seemingly has the idea that bigger, wider, and louder is necessarily better, but the dopamine rush that modern pop music can so reliably produce never arrives.
Music is like conversation. It should often feel and read like a Q&A between an artist at the moment of crafting of an album, for example, and the wider audience that will soon be presented that individual's ideas, ambitions, vision, opinions and, above all, emotions - be them external or internal. Those personal issues can manifest in multiple forms and be channeled into sound waves of endlessly varying waveforms. If you consider how sound propagates only through air - in other words: ... read more
"reputation" is an album.
Scratch that.
"reputation" is a 55-minute dumpster fire of blandness. The production is as offensively generic as electropop can get, the lyrics are horrid and it tries WAAAAYYY to hard to be edgy, most of it coming off as cringe-worthy. There are a few songs that are passable at best but the record overall is just unbearably pretentious.
Fav Tracks: New Year's Day, Delicate, Getaway Car
Least Fav Tracks: Look What You Made Me Do, ...Ready For ... read more
So I’ve actually been looking forward to this one since I’ve heard a lot of people with mixed thoughts on it, saying that it’s Taylor’s worst album, or how it’s her most overdone album, or that it’s her most overhated, etc, etc... I love the idea of going into first listens knowing that I could either enjoy or hate something and, well... I don’t think I’m on either side of that scale, I just came out of this really confused.
This album is really ... read more
When Taylor Swift fans start whining about Kanye I play On Sight and Ready for It back to back and they shut up
Fave Songs: Ready For It, I Did Something Bad, Dont Blame Me, Delicate, Gorgeous, King of My Heart, Dancing With Our Hands Tied, Dress, This is Why We Cant Have Nice Things
Contributions By
patton, thisisabtlgrnd, Alejandro González, MusicXXY, Nuzzled, boniverski, sucker, sweertner, asianboyian, Radious, MikeOwen, MarkCBecome a Donor
Donor badge, no ads + more benefits.
Donor badge, no ads + more benefits.
Advertisement
Track List
| 1 | ...Ready For It? 3:28 | 66 |
| 2 | End Game 4:04 feat. Ed Sheeran, Future | 57 |
| 3 | I Did Something Bad 3:58 | 70 |
| 4 | Don’t Blame Me 3:56 | 76 |
| 5 | Delicate 3:52 | 81 |
| 6 | Look What You Made Me Do 3:31 | 57 |
| 7 | So It Goes... 3:47 | 66 |
| 8 | Gorgeous 3:29 | 60 |
| 9 | Getaway Car 3:53 | 85 |
| 10 | King of My Heart 3:34 | 68 |
| 11 | Dancing With Our Hands Tied 3:31 | 74 |
| 12 | Dress 3:50 | 72 |
| 13 | This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things 3:27 | 55 |
| 14 | Call It What You Want 3:23 | 74 |
| 15 | New Year's Day 3:55 | 75 |
Total Length: 55 minutes
Year End Lists
| #1 | / | People |
| #5 | / | Associated Press |
| #5 | / | The New York Times: Jon Caramanica |
| #6 | / | Billboard |
| #7 | / | Rolling Stone |
| #7 | / | Rolling Stone (Australia) |
| #9 | / | Time |
| #16 | / | musicOMH |
| #17 | / | Slant Magazine |
| #19 | / | The Independent |
More Lists
Please stay on topic. To go off topic, head to the General Chat.
Sign in to comment
2w
it's a bad album, that's not a secret, it's disjointed, a lot of the stuff misses the mark even if it has interesting ideas. I can't say i agree with some wild track ratings differences tho
3w
yeah no this is pretty overhated. i return to it so often. it hasn’t aged super well, and it had some of her worst singles of her career, but the rest of the album is at least decent but mostly very good imo. i’d still rank this pretty low in her album run, but its nowhere near as bad as everyone makes it out to be.
Added on: August 23, 2017