Some music pulls you out of yourself, jolting you with the recognition that the person who’s singing is just as complex as you are. Some music gets you to surrender to the fact that you’re merely an overgrown baby who responds to repetition and rhyme. And some music strands you in a state of embarrassment at the human condition.
Taylor Swift has lately been making music in that last category, and the discomfort is reaching terminal levels. On Friday, she released four new tracks for The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, the deluxe edition of her 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl. Bonus tracks are usually thought of as, well, bonuses—treats for the fans and incidental to an artist’s arc. But the reaction this time has drawn so much disgust that it’s like Swift mailed a horse’s head to each of her listeners. Swift has long led a cultural turn toward revaluing feelings and sounds that were once thought of as childish—but now her audience seems restless to grow up.
Produced by the factory-precise hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback, Showgirl was billed as her return to pure pop after an experimental detour on 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department. Showgirl enjoyed the best-selling first week in music history—not because it amazed the broadest audience possible but because it goaded superfans to buy multiple copies. Some of those fans began to grumble that their idol was taking them for granted. Showgirl’s music mostly felt like a bad sitcom: brightly toned but cynically spirited, verbose but charmless. When Swift announced deluxe tracks last week after posting a photo of herself in an austere cocktail dress, it seemed possible she’d taken the public feedback and refined Showgirl’s fluffy, empty aesthetic.
Alas, no. Encore does contain some intriguing ideas: strings on “Patient Zero” that sound like they’re playing from the walls of Enya’s castle, a sensitive and somewhat mysterious character study on “Babylon.” But, as on the original Showgirl, the music is too stiff to soar. Verses evoke “Baby Shark” with blocky melodies that overly emphasize each rhyming syllable. Her lyrics, usually laden with double and triple meanings, invite little extended analysis. Sometimes she raps like a funky uncle delivering a wedding toast.
The worst offender is “Cleveland!” Pattering like a musical-theater sidekick, she complains about haters who make fun of her dancing and her looks, until the chorus announces that everything’s fine because her man loves her. Perky piano and glockenspiel imitate ecstatic classics such as Commodores’ “Easy” and Sufjan Stevens’s “Chicago” in the same way that stick figures imitate human beings. The problem isn’t that she sounds happy, and neither is it that she’s nah-nah-nahing at critics for the zillionth time in her career. It’s that the song hits the same note (literally, figuratively, lyrically, musically) over and over. Listening feels like getting beaten with a candy cane.
Swift’s stans are notorious for their loyalty, but online, the consensus around Encore is harsh. “I’m a Swiftie and Even I Think These New Songs Are Terrible,” the headline of Poppie Platt’s review in The Telegraph reads. The superfan-slash-critic who goes by the name Swiftologist recorded a reaction in which his voice cracked as he said, “It’s so hard to be the Swiftologist at a time like this!” One strain of backlash has centered on the notion that she’s too old to be making music this simplistic. On X, someone posted her lyrics with a picture of Sex and the City’s Samantha saying, “If you were 25, that would be adorable, but you’re 32, so that’s just stupid.” Swift will turn 37 in December.
This line of critique is a little surprising given how Swift has long subverted expectations about her age and gender. As a teenager, she wrote songs that weren’t so much wise beyond her years as reflective of the truth that young people have brains and use them. “Fifteen,” released when she was 18, empathized with and advised girls just a few years younger than her; on “22,” she both celebrated and mocked her own 22-year-old giddiness. In titling her hit 2014 album 1989, after her birth year, she practically insisted that she be seen as the consummate Millennial. As she got older, her anxieties as a 30-something in a field that loves to discard older women became a source of inspiration: She sang on 2022’s “Anti-Hero” that she felt like a “monster on a hill” next to the “sexy baby” singers coming up behind her.
Her music itself has suggested a deep rethinking of what it means to mature. Reconciling complex storytelling and catchy melodies in fresh and clever ways with each release, Swift has conveyed that growing older needn’t mean ditching the pleasures inherent to pop. Neither does it mean discarding the vulnerability, the self-interest, and the swooning that are typically seen as teenager fare. This proved influential at a time when childhood and adulthood were colliding in so many corners of culture—with shorts at the office, comic-book movies at the Oscars, and stuffed animals on adult backpacks. In the 21st century, pop culture doesn’t ask grown-ups to put away childish things; it urges them to upgrade them, remix them, and vest them with new importance to suit each phase of life.
[Read: How did Taylor Swift convince the world that she’s relatable?]
But lately the civilizationally ominous problems with clinging to youth are starting to seem glaring. Surgery and skin care in the pursuit of dewiness are warping people’s relationship with their own face. America’s romance recession has the air of a cooties panic. Democracy has been destabilized by the schoolyard-bully stylings of Donald Trump and his propagandists posting anime from official White House accounts. Last year, the musician Patrick Cosmos proposed a “new unified theory of American reality” called “everyone is twelve now.” The theory went viral because it really did seem to explain such disparate phenomena as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s meaty diet and Emerald Fennell’s slimy, silly Wuthering Heights.
At some point, a cultural countermovement calling back to earlier ideals of adulthood—restraint, nuance, care for the collective—seems likely to catch on. In music, that turn may be under way already. The breakout soul singer Olivia Dean, at age 27, projects the calm sophistication of last century’s torch singers. The country star Ella Langley just smashed the record for the longest-running Hot 100 No. 1 with music that emanates seen-it-all, world-weary wisdom (she’s also 27). In August, at Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields festival, a class of singers that’s been tagged as “girly pop” organized a serious-minded and historically informed effort for abortion rights and women’s health. Even music’s recent confrontation over Israel and Palestine resembles a coming-of-age crisis: Ed Sheeran claimed that he avoided commenting on politics in deference to kids in his audience, but eventually, the pressure to speak was so great that he took a stand.
Maybe it’s wishful thinking to glean a trend from those examples, but the simple truth is that time imparts lessons even to those who seem to resist aging. At the MTV VMAs on Sunday, where Swift debuted her “Patient Zero” video (a pulpy romantic-horror clip starring Colin Farrell and Dakota Johnson), many accolades went to another icon who’s navigated the seasons of life in her own way: Madonna. Although the 68-year-old singer’s commitment to singing about sex and dancing in corsets leads many critics to hold her up as a sad example of not acting one’s age, really she’s shown how an aversion to compromise can keep a career viable over decades. In 1998, at age 39, she released Ray of Light, an album that saw her evolve her lyrical purview—to matters of the soul and society—as she pushed her sound in lush, yet still clubby, directions. This year, she put out Confessions II, a fan-adored album of dance bangers that also managed to deliver a forthright statement about memory and mortality.
Swift’s fans, meanwhile, are exchanging theories for why she’s gone Benjamin Button. One popular (but dubious) explanation is that after marrying Travis Kelce, she’s too happy to make interesting music. Another is that everything she’s doing is “satire” (okay, but is it good?). But maybe Swift just made a strategic call after noticing how jejune pop culture has become—and in doing so, underestimated her audience. Undying support for a pop star is a fundamentally childish behavior, and although Swift’s audience still craves her brand of bubblegum confessionalism, they also expect at least the level of sophistication that she’s shown before. And at a time when so much else is regressing, artists’ role is to show us what moving forward might look like.