Is Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl her happiest album yet?

Or, as Swift seethes succinctly on a track called Elizabeth Taylor, named after the much-married movie star whom Swift beseeches here for relationship advice: “I would trade the Cartier for someone to trust.”

The Life of a Showgirl, Swift’s 12th album, bids an emphatic farewell to all her tortured poet exes – as per the title of her previous album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024). Love has arrived, in the form of “a human exclamation point”, as Swift described Kelce on his New Heights podcast back in August.

Happiness is this record’s major key, with upbeat love songs aplenty and only one of them an isolated miscalculation. The sultry opening track, The Fate of Ophelia, thanks Kelce for saving Swift from drowning in her own sorrows. The album’s cover finds her in a bath at the end of one of her blockbuster Eras tour performances, subtly echoing the famed Millais painting.

Wish List, meanwhile, lines up a very entertaining list of other people’s ambitions (“a contract with Real Madrid”, “that critical smash Palme d’Or”, “that freedom living off the grid”) with Swift’s own fondest desires: “you”, a couple of kids, a driveway with a basketball hoop. And most importantly: for the world to “leave us the fuck alone”. After joy, the emotion that most often springs out of these love songs is sheer relief.

Even the misstep, Wood, has its graces: a list of superstitions and a rare (for Swift) synth-funk nod to Stevie Wonder. The production also features a knocking-on-wood sound that recalls the pen click of her 2014 single Blank Space. A mention of her engagement ring completes a square on many Swift fans’ Showgirl bingo cards (yes, these exist). But single entendres abound (“his love was the key that opened my thighs”), providing too much information about what Swift and Kelce do in the off-season.

Certainly, there isn’t as much to painstakingly disentangle on The Life of a Showgirl as there was on its predecessor, which came accompanied by fevered speculation about its dramatis personae. (Which songs were about one manchild former lover, and which were about another depressive ex?)

The hunt for biographical details and a vibrating web of internal references all form part of the allure of Swift’s storytelling. These are not just songs, as an old TV advert for posh ready meals had it; they are Taylor Swift songs – the next evolutionary stage of the form.

That’s not to say that Showgirl is lacking in intrigue; it has more than a few riddles to solve. Two highlights – Father Figure and Actually Romantic – will feed fan theory discussions long beyond the weekend. The former track is worth the price of entry alone: a steely dissection of a past relationship that casts Swift as a gangster taking an acolyte under her wing – she is the father figure – only to be betrayed. “They don’t make loyalty like they used to,” she muses, like Logan Roy sipping whisky with Tony Soprano, to an old Hollywood swirl of strings. It’s the emotional inverse of the George Michael song of the same name, and contains the album’s biggest mic-drop line about what a baller Swift has become. “I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger,” she coos, even-toned. This reference to wood is exemplary.

Overall, her reunion with Swedish producers Max Martin and Shellback (Karl Johan Schuster) – midwives to her prime works such as Red (2012), 1989 (2014) and Reputation (2017) – makes for a punchy sequence of songs that get to the point quickly and skilfully, sprinkling elegiac bridges and middle eights in their wake (the best one, on the ticklish, piano-led Honey, boasts a jazz flute).

Despite a rollout featuring feathers and sequins, and a title track about the high price of fame featuring Sabrina Carpenter – saved for the end – The Life of a Showgirl weighs more towards the “life” than the glitz. (“Oftentimes, it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me,” confides Swift, after namechecking multiple labels and high-class destinations.)

Having proven she is best in show, key songs such as Cancelled! make the persuasive case that, despite being on top of the world, Swift counts herself among the black sheep now. Sounding like a sultry, venomous outtake from Reputation, it finds her revelling in the company of those who have fallen foul of the internet, or those with “bodies in the attic”. Perhaps she has “girlbossed too close to the sun”, she muses, as per the meme. The closing title track outlines the many pitfalls of a life in the spotlight: Swift knows the costs of doing showbusiness. Still, she “wouldn’t have it any other way”.

The Life of a Showgirl by Taylor Swift is released by EMI

Photography by Republic Records