Taylor Swift - The Life of a Showgirl

“Be my NY when Hollywood hates me”.
— Taylor Swift, “Elizabeth Taylor,” The Life of a Showgirl (October 3, 2025).

Billionaire. A four-time Album of the Year winner. The highest-grossing artist of this millennium. Named the greatest songwriter by Billboard, Rolling Stone, and Collider. Billboard’s Woman of the Decade.

New album. New producers — or, more accurately, the long-awaited return of the familiar team everyone hoped to see again. Grand statements about lyricism reminiscent of Folklore, paired with the pop sound of 1989. Loudspeakers, fanfares, fireworks, fans fainting from excitement. The pomp, the glitz, the showgirl aesthetic — all of it led to the unveiling of Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl. And even though this record is two and a half times shorter than her previous The Tortured Poets Department Anthology, there is, in fact, much more to say about it.

The album begins with “The Fate of Ophelia”, a sleek, mature pop song that feels like it could’ve been straight from Midnights. Its smooth groove and catchy chorus make for a strong opener, and it’s clearly a love letter to Travis Kelce, her fiancé. I don’t know if we should collectively pretend that it doesn’t sound like Ava Max’s “So Am I”, but anyway, what a solid start.

“Elizabeth Taylor” treads familiar territory — celebrity comparisons, old Hollywood mystique, and her renewed attempts to be a “bad bitch”. It could have easily fit into the weaker part of Reputation, and while the premise of aligning herself with Elizabeth Taylor is potentially interesting, the song never fully justifies its existence in the first place. Why her, exactly?

“Opalite” is one of the brighter spots. It’s feel-good pop with the kind of catchy, polished production that recalls Lover at its best. There’s something undeniably charming about it, and it’s easy to imagine some Vegas showgirl imagery in the background.

Then comes “Father Figure”, one of the strangest tracks on the record. Thematically, it’s a mafia-inspired song with some pointed references to her former label and its leadership. The George Michael interpolation, the messy vocal jumps, and the convoluted lyrical structure make it a bold idea that simply doesn’t land. “Eldest Daughter” follows with a gentle ballad that starts beautifully with “dying just from trying to seem cool”, only to stumble immediately into the clunky “I’m not a bad bitch, and this isn’t savage”. “Ruin the Friendship” brings a tonal dip, revisiting high school themes that Swift still seems oddly attached to. The song is okay, though.

“Actually Romantic” will no doubt become a big talking point on the internet. Let me be clear: in the grand scheme of things, I don’t really care whether it’s about Charli xcx or not, and I’m not about to go to war for or against either of them. What makes the song strange is Swift’s bluntness — she throws us into the middle of a conflict that, publicly, has never even existed. Whatever tension there may or may not be between them has always been masked by politeness and mutual praise in interviews, while Charli’s alleged “diss track”, “Sympathy Is a Knife,” deals with a completely different theme and explores her own vulnerabilities. But when you open a song by calling someone a “cokehead”, you immediately drag the tone down to the level of a petty online feud.

“Wi$h Li$t” feels like something straight out of Midnights. The first and second verses are almost identical in meaning and structure, piling on variations almost like a list separated by commas. Taylor then insists that she’s “not like everyone else” and that awards, yachts, or success don’t matter to her and that she just wants love and family — which is ironic coming from an artist who has mastered the exploitation of the industry and her fans. We all know you want your Oscar too, Taylor. And we are cool with that — why are you not?

“CANCELLED!” is a baffling track. Energetic and fast-paced, it initially promises something exciting, but quickly reveals itself as a Frankenstein’s monster assembled from fragments of (bear with me) “Lavender Haze”, “I Did Something Bad”, Lorde’s “Yellow Flicker Beat”, and Billie Eilish’s “Therefore I Am”. It took multiple listens to make sense of it, and even then, its construction feels feels odd.

“Honey” and “Wood” are not particularly interesting, both light and playful but shallow. The former sounds like a strange blend of (bear with me once again, please) Charli xcx’s “Boys”, Beyoncé’s “Church Girl”, and Swift’s own pop legacy, while the latter is simply “Sabrina Carpenter (Taylor’s Version)”.

The album closes with its title track, a duet with Sabrina Carpenter. It builds beautifully, promising a grand, theatrical explosion in line with the showgirl concept in the chorus... and it doesn’t, opting for a lighter tone. It’s sweet, touching, and absolutely fine as a closer, with its story and parallels.

Lyrically, Swift remains her own main character. The days of Folklore and Evermore, where she could step back and craft stories, are long gone. But here, it feels as though her life no longer provides particularly compelling material, and she doesn’t seem to realize it. She repeats tropes — the Hollywood comparisons (done far better on “Clara Bow”), the snarky clapbacks, the “I’m also sad and it’s not easy to be me” narratives — without offering any new insight.

This is, bluntly, her weakest album lyrically. After being criticized for the overwrought on The Tortured Poets Department, she has swung too far in the opposite direction. In an attempt to simplify her writing, she has fallen into clichés and very deep millennial-core. Many of the lyrics feel as if she’s not even all that interested in what she’s telling.

All of this points to a larger issue: Taylor Swift has spent the last half-decade balancing between trying too hard and not trying at all. When she overreaches, the work feels bloated (yet I’m still here to defend TTPD, since there’s a very good album hiding in the long tracklist). When she scales back, she retreats into a creatively stagnant comfort zone. The Life of a Showgirl sits firmly in the latter category. For an artist at her level of cultural dominance, playing it this safe is uninspired. She knows that even her most mediocre work will be canonized, and this album seems designed to do the bare minimum for maximum reward. “Hey, there’s a new team of producers and we did everything differently”, — except you didn’t.

And, of course, the whole Showgirl aesthetic. What was it for, exactly? It’s used across the album, but apart from the last track, it doesn’t really tie anything together or work as a theme.

Taylor Swift can still deliver a pleasant pop album. She’s too talented and mature as an artist not to. But I’m not going to sit there and pretend that she doesn’t sound detached, too comfortable, and strangely uninterested in her own art.

“But you don't know the life of a showgirl, babe
And you're never, ever gonna”.

5.9/10