Taylor Swift is retelling her stories with her tenth studio album, Midnights -- the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout her life.
Midnights is about reminiscing, about storied and fabled hours. In an Instagram post, Taylor wrote, "I think midnights is a complete concept album, with those 13 songs forming a full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour."
These 13 songs are a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through errors and sweet dreams.
As the countdown to release reached fever pitch, she explained that five topics inspired the album: self-hatred, revenge fantasies, wondering what might have been, falling in love, and falling apart.
Taylor's double surprise album Folklore and Evermore was announced only sixteen hours before the release, providing small insights into the albums on her social media post. Written in isolation due to the pandemic, the folk album represented Taylor in her simplest form, a storyteller.
Taylor also confessed her excitement about her return to pop music, stating,
"After these glorious years writing folk songs, there was a bit of pumping myself back out, like, you can do it, you're still bejewelled."
Midnights is Taylor Swift's first album, recorded entirely with Jack Antonoff. Taylor and Jack worked together on her first pop record in 1989 and have continued working together ever since. To capture the essence of the night, they explored gloomy, more subdued hues built around vocal effects and vintage synths.
Midnights is a visual album. All songs will have their music videos and are called 'Midnight's Music Movies.' While it's amusing to hear Taylor push her idea of pop beyond the gleams of her folkloric woods, the evolution can feel uneven.
Midnights is far dispatched from the folk instrumentation of Swift's cottage-core diptych, coming closest to mirroring 1989's more uptempo electro-pop palette.
There are filtered synth tones, swoops of dubstep-influenced bass, trap and house-inspired beats and effects that warp her voice to the point of androgyny on songs like 'Midnight Rain' and 'Labyrinth.'
The album's lead single, Anti-Hero, offers the solitude of small-hours self-loathing set to music that feels not unlike the polished '80s rock found on Swift's 1989, but less glistening.
Its militant yet peppy chorus, where the singer defines herself as 'the problem' in everyone's life, would feel right at home on reputation.
The second music video she released for the song called 'Bejeweled' is her take on the ever-known fairytale Cinderella. The video may look all glitters and shimmery, yet this song is not about diamonds and sparkles. Instead, it's about Taylor's growth and how she's come to defeat the odds against her.
Taylor cascaded into the woodland-folk aesthetic with the Lana Del Rey collaboration 'Snow on the Beach.' Strings, chimes, and heavily reverberated bass evoke an early winter morning's first snowfall.
She also released seven bonus tracks, naming these songs the 3 am tracks. In these songs, slight glimpses of folk music can be found, leaving the folk stans in awe.
Taylor's career is defined by her deeply personal songwriting, and Midnights is no exception. The album itself is a carefully crafted narrative of Taylor Swift, the individual, and the persona.
In her own words, "If you write, you can turn your lessons into your legacy."
