So much time on Taylor Swiftâs new album is spent in bedrooms. Until now, Swift had only written around sex. On reputation, she gives it due space in the plots that unfold. The limited way she wrote about intimacy (stuck in fairytales, high-school hallways, and tiny slivers of innuendo) had become as suffocating to her as an artist as it sounded to us as listeners. All the evidence you need that this move is a good one is on the song âDress.â Swift uses falsetto and sharp exhales to express how unbearable it feels to crave. Itâs sexy, sure, but itâs also so much fun. Thereâs a joy communicated between the lines about sex that is at least partially due to the freedom to sing about it at all. Itâs a great shift in gears, and not her only one.
Swiftâs last album, 1989, was marketed as an ode to '80s pop, and, accordingly, it used its fair share of synths and reverbed drums. Reputation hits "fast forward": Swift has never sounded so similar to her Top-40 contemporaries. Thereâs a negotiation with hiphop going on. Future has a verse on âEnd Game,â which boringly touches on jet-setting and his being a bad boy and nothing else. Verses in âDressâ echo those in Mariah Careyâs âShake It Off,â and as some have pointed out, R. Kellyâs âIgnition (Remix)."
âDelicateâ mimics the dancehall production of Drakeâs recent work and uses terms like âchillâ and âwhere you atâ unironically, words and phrases that wouldnât be caught dead in 1989. The resemblances matter for more than record-keeping purposes. Her willingness to touch them indicates a kind of freedom from old discretions.
The opening track â...Ready For It?â and the seventh âSo It GoesâŚâ are bookends for the sonically and lyrically abrasive first half of the album: from the defensive bite of âLook What You Made Me Doâ to the noisy dubstep on âI Did Something Bad.â The second half backs up as Swiftâs GPS redirects, and she takes a scenic route down an uncertain romance. Here, we get the albumâs highlight, âGetaway Car,â which is a thrilling song about trading a stifling relationship for a doomed affair. Itâs a total Jack Antonoff production, but at the same time, so blatantly Swift-ian in its storytelling, which is at its best when dealing with volatility. On the outro, she mourns riding/crying/dying/saying goodbye in a getaway car and it wrecks me. Conversely, happier songs like âGorgeousâ and âCall It What You Wantâ fall flat because they feel so safe.
The album closes with âNew Yearâs Dayâ, a minimally produced ballad that acknowledges how uncertain love can be. You never know if and when things are going to go off the rails. What choice do we have but to take it one day at a time. After an album full of turbulent production and emotions ranging from vengeance to yearning, this final track is the cathartic choice to relinquish control.