Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” leaves Swifties high and dry in disappointment.

The Life of a Showgirl is about Taylor Swift’s navigation through fame and relationships. Throughout the album, she talks about her fiance, Travis Kelce, and their relationship repeatedly. She also talks about the struggles of being in the spotlight and what consequences arise from it. To portray this idea more clearly, Swift decided to take us through what her life looked like during her billion dollar Eras tour.

From this, fans expected an album that they could empathize with and in a way, maybe even relate to, but were given the exact opposite. Instead, the album feels out of touch and unfamiliar with lyrics that don’t resonate with her audience.

This album was a huge letdown for us. Taylor Swift is known for her commercial success and pop music, but this album felt very rushed and in-cohesive, and lacked clear lyrical depth. The artist even mentioned that this album was made sooner than past ones and represents exactly where she is currently, both emotionally and relationship-wise. However, it seems she should have spent more time on the album. The lyrics feel soulless and seem to have a great absence of meaning. Unlike albums such as “Folklore” and “evermore”, this one seems to lack emotional and lyrical meaning. We presume this is due to her not spending enough time perfecting the album, in addition to her also trying too hard to connect with younger generations. For example, her use of slang, “did you girl boss too close to the sun,” came off as cringy and shallow, rather than cool and timeless.

When taking into consideration her past albums, they had symbolic meanings behind them that fans felt deeply resonated with, which this album lacks. Her past songs focus on heartbreak, love, growing up, and personal experiences while this albums focal point is her relationship with her new fiance, which, some may relate to but it’s a bit hard to connect to the songs when the lyrics are very particular towards them. 

An example of this is in the song “wood” where she refers directly to his “wood.” Lyrics like this throw us out of the song completely because instead of the universal, love-felt messages that were expected, she brought to us very explicit, seemingly immature and shallow songs. 

Another song that stood out to us in this way was the track “Actually Romantic.” While this song is fairly catchy, it is supposedly about drama between her and another artist where she is attacking them for their use of drugs and their one-sided animosity towards Taylor. Even so, it came out as impulsive and superficial, almost feeling as if it were written by a mean girl in high school.

Overall, this album is worth listening to if you enjoy catchy pop songs. However, if you are interested in listening to songs with meaningful intent behind them, you may want to skip this album. 

As such, we rate this album three stars out of five. We chose this ranking because whilst the album does include some pretty light-hearted and romantic songs, the lyrics in them feel disorganized and a bit disappointing coming from this artist.