Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, is both a companion piece and a counterpoint to 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department. Gone is the angst of her sprawling, self-conscious, greyest album. The Life of a Showgirl dazzles in technicolour. While it diverges from Tortured Poets, it pulls in threads from across Swift’s wider discography: the glitziness of Midnights, the disco pulse of 1989 (hardly surprising given the return of Max Martin & Shellback as producers), and ...
