The singer’s music once put a clever twist on ideas about aging and adulthood. Now she just seems to be going backwards.
Some music pulls you out of yourself, jolting you with the recognition that the person who’s singing is just as complex as you are. Some music gets you to surrender to the fact that you’re merely an overgrown baby who responds to repetition and rhyme. And some music strands you in a state of embarrassment at the human condition.
Taylor Swift has lately been making music in that last category, and the discomfort is reaching terminal levels. On Friday, she released four new tracks for The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, the deluxe edition of her 2025 albumThe Life of a Showgirl. Bonus tracks are usually thought of as, well, bonuses—treats for the fans and incidental to an artist’s arc. But the reaction this time has drawn so much disgust that it’s like Swift mailed a horse’s head to each of her listeners. Swift has long led a cultural turn toward revaluing feelings and sounds that were once thought of as childish—but now her audience seems restless to grow up.
Produced by the factory-precise hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback, Showgirl was billed as her return to pure pop after an experimental detour on 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department. Showgirl enjoyed the best-selling first week in music history—not because it amazed the broadest audience possible but because it goaded superfans to buy multiple copies. Some of those fans began to grumble that their idol was taking them for granted. Showgirl’s music mostly felt like a bad sitcom: brightly toned but cynically spirited, verbose but charmless. When Swift announced deluxe tracks last week after posting a photo of herself in an austere cocktail dress, it seemed possible she’d taken the public feedback and refined Showgirl’s fluffy, empty aesthetic.
