Lover

It’s an album with a lot of froth to it, but weighted froth — her most mature collection as well as her most fun one.

Lover is the latest proof that keeping tabs on her journey still yields its own fascinating rewards.

Lover is a fabulous record, full of super-fun standout pop hits that make your heart burst. It oozes with Swift’s much more palatable upbeat sass. She’s in love and also thinking about different kinds of love.

Lover hears Swift back on stable ground. Her songwriting is as careful, detailed and impressive as ever, she's nestled into a perfect pop niche, and it seems like being totally in love has let her head drift off into the clouds a bit. The best part: Lover lets fans wander off into the daydream with her.

The result is a dreamy record that makes good use of its stylistic freedom. It effectively subs the chaos of loving and growing for the more one-dimensional foils of Swift’s past, squashing any fears brought on by the first pair of singles that she’d tell this as a one-sided story.

Very impressive.

“Lover,” her reassuringly strong seventh album, is a palate cleanse, a recalibration and a reaffirmation of old strengths. It’s a transitional album designed to close one particularly bruised chapter and suggest ways to move forward — or in some cases, to return to how things once were.

More than either 1989 or Reputation, Lover seems fully realized and mature: Swift is embracing all aspects of her personality, from the hopeful dreamer to the coolly controlled craftsman, resulting in a record that's simultaneously familiar and surprising.

At 18 tracks long, ‘Lover’ is more sprawling and further from flawless than her 2014 pop crossover ‘1989’. But it succeeds in spite of its clunkier moments because Swift’s melodies are frequently dazzling and her loved-up lyrics are ultimately quite touching.

Lover does not sound like the work of someone desperate to command the pop zeitgeist and yet is all the more likely to do so. Instead of trying to be all things to all audiences, it plays to the strengths of a witty songwriter in love, eager to tell anyone who will listen exactly how she feels.

There is a brilliant album among the 18 songs, if only it had been pruned it a little.

Lover is, fittingly, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But nevertheless it feels like an epiphany: free and unhurried, governed by no one concept or outlook, it represents Swift at her most liberated.

The maturation through Taylor Swift’s career has also shown her react to personal change in real time. ... Maturity for Taylor Swift means shrugging off what isn’t worth a fight, looking inward rather than blaming others, and being able to admit when you were wrong.

Though uneven, Lover is a bright, fun album with great emotional honesty.

It’s an album that screams out for an editor, but when it hits the right notes, it demonstrates just why Taylor Swift is one of the biggest pop stars in the world.

Ultimately, Lover is overstuffed and meandering, but serves as a positive reprieve from her past struggles in the public eye, and represents an artist at the peak of her creativity, power, and—one hopes—continued romantic bliss.

Lover is a plethora of things: a Taylor Swift genre sampler, an argument that Jack Antonoff is her best collaborator, a continuation of her problem with lead singles, and a collection of great synthpop songs, but the best part of it is that Taylor seems like she’s never been better. She’s unburdened by love, and that explosive happiness makes itself present across this record.

Like its predecessor [Reputation], Lover shines when the bombast is stripped away and the songs are humble and discreet, even muffled.

Ultimately, the album’s highlights are those songs where the voice and sentiment we hear is truly her own, the enthralling, stirring, emotion- manipulating voice that’s threaded its way through every album since her 2006 debut, not the voice that leans too close to what the pop music machine demands.

Some pop stars may be too big too fail. Swift’s songwriting suffers from occasional bromides, and Lover can feel both overthought and, at a lengthy 18 tracks, under-edited. But Swift’s well-earned reputation for over-sharing, reflective of the generation for which she’s become a spiritual envoy, coupled with her newfound egalitarianism makes her not just a compelling pop figure, but an essential one.

On an album this long, there is equal room for good and bad, and you’re always equidistant from either one no matter what track you’ve reached.

An album where the filler and the nuggets struggle for supremacy. ... Yet even those indifferent to Swift’s charms since she emerged as a teen-pop hitmaker in 2006 would probably acknowledge that she’s got a knack for writing hooks, and there are plenty of them on “Lover.”

There are blank pages for fans to fill in. At nearly 30, the singer-songwriter remains an intriguing mixture of industry power-broker and giddy cat-obsessive. Lover is fine with that, but the real battle is where she goes after this.

The big problem with Lover is that it’s too long, the suspicion being that Swift is trying to reassert her commercial dominance by spread-betting.