Since Taylor Swift launched the record-breaking Eras Tour, in 2023—a hundred and forty-nine dates, fifty-one cities, more than two billion dollars in ticket sales—she has been freakishly omnipresent in the cultural consciousness: a grinning lodestar in Louboutin boots. The tour ended last December, but, rather than ceding the spotlight, Swift doubled down on her mega-celebrity, first with a wildly publicized engagement to Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, and then by releasing “The Life of a Showgirl,” her twelfth studio album, and her second in less than eighteen months. It’s a cocky, temperamental record about power and insecurity. “What could you possibly get for the girl who has everything and nothing all at once?” she sings on “Elizabeth Taylor,” one of the album’s best and heaviest tracks. That paradox is central to Swift’s gestalt. She is equal parts formidable (“I’ll be your father figure / I drink that brown liquor / I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger,” she boasts on “Father Figure”) and bruised. “I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness / I’ve been dying just from trying to seem cool,” she sighs on “Eldest Daughter,” a doleful ballad. (“Terminal uniqueness” is a phrase used in A.A. or other recovery programs—a toxic belief in your own exceptionalism.)

Swift has been slow to abandon the underdog mentality she developed as an upstart. What she does for a living is surely gruelling, but relentlessly pointing out how fame is poisonous and burdensome isn’t exactly revelatory. (A lot of jobs are hard; very few make a person unspeakably rich.) On “The Life of a Showgirl,” Swift is occasionally tender—“Honey” is arch, delicate, lovely—but more often she is vengeful, eschewing vulnerability in favor of bombast.

Sometimes it works; often it doesn’t. Swift reunited with the Swedish producer Max Martin and his protégé Shellback, the same long-haired studio savants responsible for co-creating some of her most iconic singles. More recently, Swift has been working with the indie-leaning producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, though by her 2024 release, “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology”—a wearying double album of savage, embittered breakup songs—it felt as though those relationships had ebbed, creatively. Martin, who is fifty-four, is the most commercially successful songwriter of the twenty-first century; his work is meticulous and precise, and his songs are taut, balanced, unyielding. (Part of the odd pleasure of his writing, which abides by some kind of inscrutable mathematics, is its strictness.) Martin is an interesting foil for Swift, who is so hyper-focussed on narrative and phrasing that she has now self-styled as something of an angsty comp-lit major. (“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” she wrote when announcing her engagement.) Martin, whose first language is Swedish, is chiefly concerned with melody. He writes lyrics phonetically (he has brought up the punchiness of ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” as a kind of beacon)—a practice that can result in hilariously off-kilter grammar. (On the pre-chorus of Ariana Grande’s “Break Free,” Grande exultantly sings, “Now that I’ve become who I really are!” Swift, of course, would never.)

Together, Swift and Martin’s overlapping obsessions have created a handful of perfect pop songs, including “Blank Space,” a funny, caustic, and inventive tune—possibly still Swift’s best—about the various ways love can feel doomed from the jump. (I laugh every time Swift sings, “Wait, the worst is yet to come . . . / Oh, no!”) “The Life of a Showgirl,” however, is missing some essential dynamism. Swift thrives within a rubric of structure and rigor. This is why the Eras Tour, with its clearly defined epochs and sharply choreographed cues, was so spectacular—she is a master of law and order. Yet Swift’s aesthetic of flawlessness (when she announced the album on “New Heights,” the sports podcast Travis Kelce hosts with his brother, Jason, I was briefly hypnotized by the utter exactitude of her winged eyeliner) is becoming the most dated thing about her. A scrappier, more chaotic vibe has fully supplanted the over-filtered perfection of the mid-aughts. Swift might approximate mess, but real heads can tell—she’s got it under control.

That might also be why Swift is so weirdly unconvincing when singing about sex, an experience that requires submission both to another person and to your own charred, mercurial desires. On “Wood,” a theoretically horny disco song about feeling safe in a relationship, she manages to make getting laid sound embarrassing. “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was the key to open my thighs,” she sings. The song is filled with cringey double entendres: “Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet, mmm / To know a hard rock is on the way.” O.K.! The same song features the line “The curse on me was broken by your magic wand,” which is of course very funny, but also gestures to a broader problem of perspective: There is no curse on you, Taylor Swift! You are simply . . . alive on Earth.

Musically, Swift’s pivot toward concision feels like a response to claims that her last album was repetitive and overlong. On “New Heights,” Swift described “The Tortured Poets Department” as “a data dump of everything I’ve thought, felt, or experienced in two or three years,” a tacit recognition of its rawness and volume. I found the album’s urgency and grandiosity exhausting at the time, though, in retrospect, I recognize the feral energy of the freshly brokenhearted, still teeming with rage and ache. Swift is successful enough to ignore her haters (or her exes), but it appears that she simply cannot—in fact, she sings about her enemies constantly. On “Actually Romantic,” a song widely presumed to be about Charli XCX (it sounds a little like Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” and a lot like Olivia Rodrigo), Swift pretends to be turned on by Charli’s vitriol: “I heard you call me Boring Barbie when the coke’s got you brave . . . I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it / It’s kinda making me wet.” (For those not mired in Swift lore: Charli was an opener for Swift on the “Reputation” tour, but is now married to a member of the 1975, the British rock band fronted by Swift’s louche ex Matty Healy—make of this what you will!) Swift’s best songs are overloaded with animus, either for herself or for people who have let her down. Fury is a powerful engine. One gets the sense that, in every transaction, Swift is always keeping score.

Swift is masterly when it comes to making money. This is the aspect of her career that most often forces me to interrogate whatever gnarly misogynist impulses are buried deep within my psyche: Would I find it just as obscene if, say, Morgan Wallen or Drake released thirty-six physical variants of an album? Part of what’s uncomfortable about Swift’s ambition is that she has built an empire on intimacy, or at least a simulacrum of intimacy. “I’m in the business of human emotion,” Swift said on “New Heights,” shortly before unveiling “The Life of a Showgirl” by removing the LP from a bespoke briefcase.

Lately, it feels as if her capacity to connect in new ways is beginning to falter—too much business, not enough emotion. While Swift’s life is extraordinary, it’s also cloistered by wealth and celebrity; perhaps the range of feelings she’s allowed to experience has become circumscribed. It’s easy to be paranoid and pissed when your interactions are eternally off balance and your validation is so tied to public perception. “Everybody’s cutthroat in the comments / Every single hot take is cold as ice,” she sings on “Eldest Daughter,” a song mostly about websites. Swift is at a rich moment in her life—thirty-five can be the tipping point between youth and something else—but a lot of what’s here, from the production to the performance to the lyrical themes, suggests she’s not terribly concerned with transformation. In a way, Swift herself entrenched the idea that an artist should have eras, remaining attentive to the heft and thrill of reinvention, but “The Life of a Showgirl” is mostly about itself. On the album’s title track, a pretty, moody duet with Sabrina Carpenter, Swift inadvertently admits to her own seclusion, estrangement, distance: “You don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe / And you’re never, ever gonna.” ♦