Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl is a triumphant pop victory lap

October 2, 2025

Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl is a triumphant pop victory lap

The last time we met Taylor Swift, she was spiralling.

Her last album, The Tortured Poets Department, was an emotional purge - a stunned post mortem of two bitter, messy break-ups.

We found her at her lowest, "crying at the gym" and "pissed off" at wasting her youth on a six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn, that ultimately fizzled out.

Eighteen months later, she's back with the latest update from her bureau; and the story is very different.

Recorded in stolen moments during the record-shattering Eras tour, it finds the 35-year-old happy, energised and newly in love with American Footballer Travis Kelce.

"This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant," she said in an appearance on Kelce's New Heights podcast last month .

To capture that dynamic, she produced the album not with her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff – whose pillowy productions defined the sounds of Midnights, and Tortured Poets Department – but with Swedish pop masterminds Max Martin and Shellback, who previously worked with Swift on hits like Shake It Off and I Knew You Were Trouble.

The goal, said Swift, was to make a tight, compact album of "bangers" (that's hit songs, not sausages) with "melodies that were so infectious that you're almost angry at it".

But enough preamble. Is The Life of a Showgirl a rhinestone-studded success, or a chorus line catastrophe?

Getting straight to the point: It's a triumph.

It is a combination of compelling songwriting and whip-smart production that easily clears the high bar Swift has set for herself.

Fans expecting a return to the maximalist pop of Red and 1989 might be surprised.