What’s Keeping Taylor Swift Awake? His love dilemmas and the scars they left; the pressure induced by the insistence of the gaze that one carries on his famous person; anxiety; the doubt ; the need to prove, to its detractors in particular, that it is capable of the best. In short, nothing that she has not already told in her discography, to which we must now add Midnightsa touching, but unequal tenth album, marking her return to synthetic pop, after two pandemic albums where she had taken refuge in folk and art rock.
Released in 2020, Folklore and Evermore, designed, orchestrated and recorded with the help of brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National, aptly responded to the confined atmosphere of the moment, which the Grammys underlined by crowning it first Album of the Year. The pair of albums also boosted Taylor Swift’s notoriety as a songwriter, her confidence-inspiring songwriting style being enhanced with well-crafted imagery and better-turned phrases.
This talent, she injects it today in a pop drowned in synths, posed on rubbery bass lines – the texture conferring this unity of tone to the songs of the album – and a variety of rhythms ranging from light trap to tempered house, as if the musician signaled that she wanted to resume the climb to the top of the radio charts, where she left us with the album Lover in 2019.
If not more contrite. Without naughty melodies like those of the refrains of ME and of You Need To Calm Down. Without the flashy and bouncy rhythms of The Manall taken from Lover. Back to synth pop and electro-pop, then, but without the obvious radio hits that populated his previous records — with the exception, perhaps, of very good and very new wave, Karmaplaced at the end of the album.
There is this atmosphere, this climate, crossing Midnights, which very clearly bears the hallmark of director and regular collaborator Jack Antonoff. It amazes with its meticulous and careful sound design, but often baffles in the studio effects it affixes to Swift’s voice, sometimes making it sound more crystalline or too often muffled (on the menacing and skeletal Vigilant Shit, in particular), extinct. On Midnight RainSwift and Antonoff take the most audacious aesthetic risk, completely transforming the timbre and range of the voice during the chorus without rhythm, except that of two hands clapping.
The title alone denotes the nocturnal character of these generally soft songs; past the solids Lavender Haze and brown in the opening, Taylor Swift plunges into the heart of her nights with the creeping and tragic Anti-hero, one of the most successful of the album. On the other hand, the following Snow on the Beach disappoints, considering that it is a duet with another artist recently adored for her pen, Lana Del Ray. Precious strings, undulating guitars, voices haloed with echoes and banal melody. Shame. Composed and performed with the artist’s lover, Joe Alwyn (under his pen name William Bowery), Sweet Nothing goes straight to the heart with its soothing and love-struck text. It would have concluded this bittersweet electro-pop album perfectly, but Swift instead chose to serve up a last more rhythmic one in the finale, Mastermind. Then, seven others, appeared on the platforms in the middle of the night: these ” 3am songs form a pleasant coda to Midnightsalbum cautious in its form, but inspired in its lyrics.