Taylor Swift doesn’t really need another review. With The Life of a Showgirl, she’s already guaranteed wall to wall coverage, endless think pieces, and enough social media discourse to last until her next reinvention. What follows, then, is not the perspective of a diehard Swiftie but of an outsider: someone without encyclopaedic knowledge of Easter eggs, without parasocial loyalty, and without the expectation that every track will strike gold. It’s the view of a listener who respects Swift’s undeniable place at the centre of both the music industry and modern pop culture and enjoys the occasional single when it cuts through the noise.
The album wastes no time in showing its cards. Opener The Fate of Ophelia tries to fuse Shakespearean tragedy with pop melodrama, casting Swift as a modern Ophelia who refuses to drown. It is clever in theory, a solid display of her instinct for story telling, but the chorus floats rather than hits. Elizabeth Taylor fares better, folding Hollywood glamour and public scrutiny into a self portrait that actually matches the grandiosity of the title’s namesake.
That is where the intrigue peaks. Max Martin and Shellback reunited with Swift during her last tour and she spent time in Sweden working on the record, the three of them co-producing but nothing really sticks out. Opalite vanishes before it lands. Wood and Honey barely register. Even the title track, saddled with a Sabrina Carpenter feature, ends up underwhelming. The potential for sparkle with Carpenter’s involvement was there as she’s known for playful innuendo and fun, collapses into a meandering duet that neither artist seems to believe in.
Every so often Swift reaches for something meatier. Father Figure toys with authority using an interpolation of the George Michael classic. What first reads as a mafia drama, complete with threats and family codes you would find in a cliched mob film; “You’ll be sleeping with the fishes before you know you’re drowning” could be really a reflection on Swift’s own history with male power players in the industry (Scooter Braun underhandedly buying her masters and the drama that enfolded or her dealing with misogynistic criticism throughout her career). It is one of the few tracks where the theatre has genuine menace: “Mistake my kindness for weakness and find your card cancelled”. Eldest Daughter is another example, and sounds like it hangs on to her folklore and evermore sound and showcases her penchant for finding meaningful lyricism: “every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter so we all dressed up as wolves.” You can hear exactly why people cling to her words, but with this, they should just let go.
Unfortunately, moments of clarity are drowned out by songs that feel like contract fulfilment than having anything to say. Anything Romantic, allegedly a dig at Charli xcx, has all the makings of a headline but none of the bite. Where Bad Blood sounded like a triumphant dagger in the ribs, this feels more like a pointed meh. If you are going to create a diss track at least make it cutting and fun. It’s interesting that the discourse about this diss track is that it’s a response to Charli’s BRAT track Sympathy is a knife. But in that song Charli expressed the song in itself is not a diss but her exploring her own anxiety, her insecurities, and how her brain builds stories in her head when under pressure. So it seems like odd that Swift would ‘respond’ and crafted her own narrative and basically getting her wires crossed.
The deeper issue with Showgirl is not just the music but the machinery surrounding it. Swift’s last album was subjected to endless digital editions, each timed for maximum chart impact, each padded with little more than one extra track. It felt like a release, rinse, repeat process to her fans and one that she’s adopted in the lead up to this release, albeit not as expansive (yet!). It feels less about artistic expression and more about a sales strategy, and that sense of churn lingers bitterly here. The rollout for Showgirl feels similarly calculated with multiple vinyl variants, pricey merch, and a cycle designed to keep Swift perpetually in record books for first week sales and chart positions rather than genuinely reflective or risk taking. The result is an album that feels like it has been drained of the urgency before the era has even begun and a little deflating now it’s upon us. What might have been a statement on fame and reinvention comes across instead as an expensive exercise in preserving her existing deity image .
The Life of a Showgirl is less dazzling spectacle than hoped. There is polish, of course, but little excitement. It carries the unmistakable air of a product: another entry in a lucrative franchise rather than a substantial piece of her discography.
Swift’s fans will adore it regardless and for casual listeners it works as a pleasant enough background. But for outsiders, it confirms that her world is not necessarily one you need to enter. She remains a great storyteller, yes, but here the stories are fragments that never cohere into something vital. At her best, during the fizzing reinvention of 1989 or the venomous bite of Reputation, she felt like she was reshaping pop music around her. With Showgirl, she settles for simply feeding the machine.
2/5
Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ is released Friday 3rd October 2025 on Republic Records.
