reputation

Like its most recent predecessors, Reputation is a roman à clef that begs the listener to decode which kiss-and-tell relates to which A-list former beau.

Never has she sounded freer than she does here, a self-styled villain biting the forbidden fruit of gossip and letting its juices run down her neck.

I’ll venture to call it her most focused, most cohesive album yet.

While Reputation packs heavy artillery that was almost entirely absent from ‘1989’, it’s actually a helluva ride.

Reputation is a big, brash, all-guns-blazing blast of weaponised pop that grapples with the vulnerability of the human heart as it is pummelled by 21st-century fame.

At the heart of Reputation lies a sequence of songs that chart the rise, fall and fallout of a fleeting relationship and offer a masterclass in pop songwriting along the way.

Reputation is her most intimate album – a song cycle about how it feels when you stop chasing romance and start letting your life happen. As one of the all-time great pop masterminds, she's trying something new, as she always does.

Swift doesn’t need her lover to save her, as she notes on album standout “Call It What You Want”, which is, arguably, the best song Swift has ever made. Its lyrics are more open and willingly vulnerable than anything she’s done before.

It's Swift's willingness to portray herself not as a victim, but the villain of her own story that makes Reputation such a fascinatingly thorny glimpse inside the mind of pop's reigning princess.

The sparkling, writerly synth-pop of 1989 has been jettisoned almost entirely, replaced by thudding trap beats, Vegas EDM, melancholy Drive-wave synthesizers, and splashes of Miami bass. More often than not, it works.

Reputation is an oddly bifurcated creation, half obsessed with grim score-settling and celebrity damage, half infatuated with a lover who takes her away from all that.

The midas pop touch that ran through 1989, on which she struck the perfect balance between her past and present selves, is lacking here; she’s sacrificed some of it for such a wholesale acceptance of current pop trappings. What’s refreshing about Reputation, though, is that she’s no holding holding the mask so tightly to her face.

Reputation showcases a grown-up Swift, that's for certain. But she can't yet shake the fabled girl-next-door persona she has always written into her songs, no matter how hard she tries to play the Bad Girl.

1989 fans will breathe a sigh of relief when "I Did Something Bad" kicks in, though, which starts off a string of shiny pop songs that not only feel like a more natural progression from the last album, but improve upon each listen in that sneaky way Swift songs tend to do. ... The moments on Reputation that Swift stans appreciate the most are likely the ones casual listeners will be quickest to dismiss.

From a purely musical standpoint, it’s a pretty good album--even when she’s throwing this many ideas against the wall, Swift is too talented a songwriter to miss her target more than a few times per record.

It is also Ms. Swift chasing that good feeling, pushing back against a decade of following her own instincts. And it works. Reputation is fundamentally unlike any of her other albums in that it takes into account — prioritizes, actually — the tempo and tone of her competition. Reputation is a public renegotiation, engaging pop music on its terms, not hers.

It’s full of bulletproof hooks and sticky turns of phrase. But in committing to a more conventional form of superstardom, Swift has deemphasized the skill at the core of her genius.