Midnights
Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.”
Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, the album marks Swift's first body of new work since her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore.
More interested in setting atmosphere than chasing trends, Taylor Swift’s 10th album pursues a newly subdued and amorphous pop sound.
Taylor Swift moves away from the experimental magic of folklore and evermore and delivers a giddy, self-reflective crusade with Midnights
The pop titan's tenth record pivots away from her lockdown creations and recent re-recording project, offering up brighter sounds
Fundamentally a collection of hazy and unambiguously autobiographical love songs, Midnights finds its creator and her producer searching for a new pop sound to match Swift's late night thoughts.
Swift’s 10th album is a brooding all-night affair, complete with some of her sleekest pop tunes yet.
Her lost nights are pulled together through a sound that lands somewhere between intimacy and soft pop production.
The subtle melodies of Midnights take time to sink their claws in. But Swift’s feline vocal stealth and assured lyrical control ensures she keeps your attention
Impressively finding yet another new way to reinvent herself as an artist, Taylor Swift has crafted an intoxicating concept album shimmering with honesty.
Midnights isn't a retreat so much as a return, a revival of the moody electro-pop that kept Reputation roiling.
Nothing exists in a vacuum — least of all a Taylor Swift album. Perhaps more so than any other modern-day pop star, to be a critical consume...
Even a taste would have given Midnights away as her most radical shift yet and the strongest reinvention we’ve seen from Taylor Swift in the most honest way.
Midnight has long been associated with magic and mystery, with transformation, imagination, rumination, and dark nights of the soul. Or in Taylor Swift’s case 13 of them.
A diary entry always exists at a point of compromise: it is made to be read, and it is made to be never read. It bursts at the edges where stories relayed
Pastoral phase behind her, Swift is back in the city with an album of fascinating small-hours contemplation
With ‘Midnights,’ Taylor Swift proves she’s unwilling to operate on anyone’s terms other than her own. Read our review.
On 'Midnights', Taylor Swift reflects on the ghosts of the past and maps the rarely straightforward journey of fully becoming one's self with pristine popcraft.
Midnights by Taylor Swift Album Review by Sam Franzini. The multi-artist's full-length is now out via Republic Records and steaming services
With its confident songwriting and understated synth-pop, Swift’s sophisticated 10th album indicates that she no longer feels she has to compete with her peers
Taylor Swift - Midnights review: 13 songs, 44 minutes, 8,293.54 pats on the back
Cleverly written about 13 sleepless nights across her life, the star’s 10th album moves away from earworms to more adventurous territory
A thread of feverishness ripples through the record, perhaps the most angst-infused the singer has yet released since Reputation