‘Midnights’ is spirited pop for the small hours. Romantic and revengeful, Taylor’s tenth album glides through every emotion at that mystifying hour, from sweet dreams to night terrors in a newly subdued and nebulous pop sound.
An album that has unsurprisingly taken the charts by storm, claiming all top 10 Billboard spots and scoring Taylor’s 11th number one album, it’s difficult to argue with the iron grip Swift has over the music industry, even if the album wasn’t a favourite with all Swifties at first.
After my initial listen I wanted more, ‘Midnights’ lacked something, perhaps a high intensity chorus or flex of Swift’s vocal range or a ‘Evermore’-esk narrative. In hindsight, perhaps I lacked the understanding of what the album is supposed to be: if ‘Folklore’ is brooding on a walk through the woods, ‘Midnights’ is walking home at 3am after a night out, with your makeup slightly smudged, reflecting on life. It’s something to be whispered or spoken, it’s the thoughts inside your head as the clock strikes twelve.
‘Lavender Haze’ is the first on the album to soundtrack Swift strutting out of the Folklorian woods back towards the familiar electronic pop she temporarily closed the door on in 2019. Expressive and soaked in technicolour synth pop, the song seems to build to a huge, swelling chorus that fails to appear. Despite this, ‘Lavender Haze’ is a catchy start that immediately sets the tone of this new era.
The instant shift in mood to the sombre ‘Maroon’ confirms Swift’s return to her diaristic style of writing. Packed with Taylor-isms (‘The one I was dancin’ with in New York’) and familiar musical echoes of ‘King of my heart’, ‘Maroon’ reminisces the high and lows of love with inherently more maturity than Swift’s previous songs on the topic. Perhaps ‘Maroon’ is quite literally a darker, more complex version of her 2012 hit ‘Red’, looking back with a sense of yearning for what was both good and bad. Swift almost talks through the bridge, sounding numb despite the passionate lyrics, a technique echoed in ‘Snow on the beach’, a song in which Lana Del Rey simply fails to make an appearance on, outside of a few whispered, woozy harmonies.
Despite the overall album creating its own stand-out sound, it can’t go without mention that some songs sound more like they belong on ‘reputation’ than reputation itself. ‘Karma’, ‘Midnight Rain’ and ‘Vigilante Shit’ are calm, collected and calculated. Similar to ‘Maroon’, these reflections are mature; luxurious, and reveling her enemy’s comeuppance. It’s been argued that whilst ‘Karma’ could make reference to Scooter Braun (who stole Swift’s master recordings and caused perhaps the greatest revenge plot in music history – the re-recordings) in the lyrics ‘spider boy, king of thieves, weave your little webs of opacity, my pennies made your crown… it’s coming back around’, ‘Vigilante Shit’ could be alluding to Kim and Kanye’s breakup. Like the final track ‘Mastermind’, these songs are for the midnight plotters, who’s brains won’t shut off before sleep.
Yet whilst the drama takes place outside, Swift’s simplest song focuses on the calmness inside of her love ‘in the kitchen humming’. A song for (and co-written by) Taylor’s boyfriend Joe Alwyn, ‘Sweet Nothing’ is, in my opinion, one of Swift’s best love songs. So soft and sweet like a children’s nursery rhyme, the song encapsulates the simplicity of being loved and admired, despite the comments from the outside world: ‘I wrote a poem, you say “what a mind”, this happens all the time.’
This matured attitude is retained even in the ‘sparkly gel pen’ songs ‘Question…?’ and ‘Bejeweled’. Sugary-sweet ‘Bejeweled’ is most certainly a song to get ready to: having previously used references to jewels with negative connotations (‘A never-needy, ever lovely jewel who’s shine reflects on you’ in All Too Well 10 minute version) Swift now reclaims the beauty of this newly confident persona who can ‘still make the whole place shimmer’.
Two particular stand-outs on the album were ‘Anti-Hero’ and ‘You’re On Your Own Kid’. Despite the somewhat jarring ‘sexy baby’ reference to sitcom 30 Rock (Swifites will be defending that one for a long time) ‘Anti-Hero’ is a relatable, catchy song on self reflection and realisation that would sit perfectly in a diary entry. Similar realisations are explored in ‘You’re On Your Own Kid’, a song that deserves to soundtrack a main character of a film. Effortlessly building up to the best bridge on the album, Swift acknowledges how she ‘hosted parties and starved [her] body’, during her restrictive eating disorder that she first opened up about in her documentary ‘Miss Americana’. Catchy and confident, both songs are a staple of ‘Midnights’.
As ‘Mastermind’ asserts a literal and metaphoric creative agency, it draws the album to a close, leaving us wondering what the mastermind herself will create next. Fortunately, we only had to wait a matter of hours before a plethora of bonus material was released in the form of the 3am Tracks, seven songs that didn’t make the final 13, but certainly deserved to. The conversational first verse of ‘Paris’ is a particular favourite, as well as the gut wrenching bridge and lyrics ‘give me back my girlhood, it was mine first’ in ‘Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve’.
Without a doubt, ‘Midnights’ does exactly what it says on the tin, following the calculated thoughts of an overthinker, to admiring the prettiness of the hour and the sweet love alongside it, the album and it’s bonus tracks explore every emotion that could be felt when the clock strikes twelve.
7/10
