Taylor Swift's Midnights is here — and it's a vibe.
As the clock struck 12 on Friday morning, the 32-year-old pop star dropped her tenth studio album, entering her latest era.
After venturing into a metaphorical indie-rock forest for her 2020 sister albums folklore and evermore, Swift is now out of the woods on Midnights, a moody indie-pop concept album she has said was inspired by 13 restless nights.
Sonically, the new record — with its woozy synths, trap beats and drum machines — is most similar to the industrial pop deep cuts of her underrated 2017 LP reputation, with some of the more exciting, experimental moments from Lover and evermore.
And this collection of songs is versatile enough — it could soundtrack a party, a rendezvous with a lover or just a solo night in with a bottle of Malbec.
Thematically, Midnights explores some familiar topics for Swift: love, revenge and public image. On the fantastic album opener "Lavender Haze," the star sings of her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn and the endless engagement rumors and scrutiny they've weathered ("All they keep asking me / Is if I'm gonna be your bride / The only kind of girl they see / Is a one night or a wife").
With the contemplative love song "Sweet Nothing," Alwyn (under his pen name William Bowery) receives his sixth songwriting credit on a Swift project.
He's not the only collaborator on the album, either: Longtime creative partner Jack Antonoff returns as a cowriter and producer. And Lana Del Rey, who has long inspired Swift (see: "Wildest Dreams," "Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince"), joined her to cowrite and deliver vocals on "Snow on the Beach," a poetic, sweeping rumination on romance with an incredible Janet Jackson shoutout: "It's like snow at the beach / Weird but f---ing beautiful … Now I'm all for you like Janet."
As on reputation, Swift sings of vengeance on Midnights. And it's delicious, not bitter, on "Vigilante S--t" ("Draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man") and "Karma" ("Karma is my boyfriend / Karma is a god / Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend / Karma's a relaxing thought / Aren't you envious that for you it's not?"), seemingly inspired by her ongoing feud with Scooter Braun.
After bouncing back from myriad public spats, Swift has grown more self-aware than ever in recent years. Her musings on vulnerabilities and public image make "Anti-Hero" one of the most relatable tracks on the album, with lyrics like: "I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser … It's me, hi / I'm the problem, it's me … I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror / It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero."
Some of Swift's strongest songwriting has come from flipping the narrative of how detractors have painted her, like when she stuck it to misogynistic trolls with 2014's "Blank Space," a hilarious satirical, self-referential song about her "man-eater" reputation.
Swift has also been called "calculated" and "manipulative." Here, those descriptors inspire album closer "Mastermind," presumably about her happy, healthy relationship with Alwyn.
"What if I told you none of it was accidental / And the first night that you saw me nothing was going to stop me / I laid the ground work and then just like clockwork / The dominoes cascaded in a line / What if I told you I'm a mastermind and now you're mine / It was all by design," she sings in the chorus.
It's songs like "Mastermind" that make Midnights a masterpiece.
