Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department review: fans going to Dublin gigs have a new wealth of riches to look forward to

Swift is the heavyweight champion when it comes to pop — nobody, not even Beyoncé, comes close. She was, by a huge distance, the globe’s most streamed artist last year and her Eras tour, which calls to Dublin for three dates this summer, is already the highest grossing in history.

She enjoyed a huge box office return for the concert film of that tour. Far from just being a digital superstar, she outsells everyone when it comes to vinyl — with 3.5 million LPs shifted in the US alone last year. Swift is gargantuan and when one considers the fervour of her fanbase — the ‘Swifties’ — everything she does, every word she says and every lyric she writes is parsed and analysed and reappraised.

And so it will be with The Tortured Poets Department, which is easily the most autobiographical of her career. It’s also, unashamedly, a break-up album although, intriguingly, it seems to be inspired by two break-ups — her six-year relationship with the English actor Joe Alwyn and a subsequent fling with another son of Blighty, The 1975 frontman Matty Healy.

Some break-up albums bristle with anger — Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks is a case in point — and this one is even more vitriolic. Swift appears to be a woman scorned and she doesn’t hold back. RIP to Alwyn and Healy’s mentions, as a young Swiftie might put it.

Most of the rage appears directed at Healy. Take the acidic title track, which lambasts an unnamed, tattooed, typewriter-toting figure for being in “self-sabotage mode/ Throwing spikes down on the road”. It seems to have been a tempestuous time as Swift sings of an especially catty fight: “You’re not Dylan Thomas/ I’m not Patti Smith/ This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel/ We’re modern idiots.”

Even more vicious is the piano-led ballad The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived. “I don’t even want you back,” she sings, over the prettiest sonic backdrop. “I just want to know if rusting my sparkling summer was the goal.” And later: “Once your queen had come/ You treat her like an also-ran/ You didn’t measure up in any measure of a man.”

The album is full of such barbed remarks and it’s notable how superbly honed her lyrics are now. Swift has plenty to say and she puts considerable care into the words she uses.

The Alwyn songs — assuming they are about the actor who starred in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends — are gentler, with real sadness underneath the surface. That’s certainly the case on the exquisitely produced So Long, London, which opens with Swift’s vocals multi-tracked: “I stopped CPR, after all it’s no use/ The spirit was gone, we will never come to.”

And it’s surely the case on Guilty as Sin?, a track that features one of the loveliest vocals Swift has ever committed to tape. There’s memory about a shared love of the great Scottish band The Blue Nile when she notes sadly, “He sent me Downtown Lights/ I hadn’t heard it in a while/ Am I allowed to cry?”

There are a couple of big-name guest appearances. Rapper and singer Post Malone adds heft to opening track Fortnight — “I took the miracle move-on drug/ It’s effects were temporary” — while Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine provides a beautiful duet on Florida!!! Both these artists have a propensity for melodramatic performances, but here they are reined in and the results are all the better.

The album is jointly produced by Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. Both have worked on several Swift albums before and their strengths play well here. The former presumably satisfies Swift’s pure pop instincts while the latter — whose day job is The National’s lead guitarist — may cater for her folk inclinations, songs that are in a classic Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter vein.

The album contains few of the anthemic bangers that she delivered so spectacularly on her masterpiece, 1989, which was released 10 years ago. That album was made with the huge input of the Swedish hit-maker Max Martin. Modern-day Taylor Swift seems much more comfortable putting her own creativity forward and not delegating to the masters of pop.

There are several influences on this album. Much of it is a celebration of synths and drum machines, other songs take a more organic approach when it comes to instrumentation. One quibble is that on a few initial listens the tempo appears quite samey, but subsequent listens are likely to shift that impression if previous albums are anything to go by.

There’s a great deal to appreciate here and while the album could have been a little shorter, Swift’s preeminence as the world’s biggest star is showing no signs of dimming. (It should be pointed out that she also unexpectedly dropped 15 bonus tracks, collectively known as The Anthology — Swift fans will be busy all weekend.)

The only headache she faces now is how to incorporate some of these songs into the marathon shows on her Eras tour. It’s great news for the 165,000 people who managed to nab tickets for her trio of Aviva shows — they now have even more riches to anticipate.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆