If she leans in to a particular pop style, it’s the one she and Antonoff have been honing for her last two albums, with thick, ethereal arrangements that suggest the scores to films where children discover fantasy worlds. The best example here is “Cruel Summer,” on which Swift sings in several of her signature voices — the question-mark syllables that shoot to the sky, the hard-felt smears and the childlike chants: “I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you!”

But in the middle of “Lover” comes a hard brake: “Soon You’ll Get Better,” an intimate acoustic song about Swift’s mother, Andrea, who is battling cancer. Swift was never a completely unvarnished performer, but early in her career, she cut extremely close to the bone. Here, agonized harmonies by the Dixie Chicks serve as an empathetic swaddle as Swift is lyrically immediate: “Holy orange bottles, each night I pray to you/desperate people find faith, so now I pray to Jesus too.”

The jolting specificity of these words only underscores how Swift has been retreating from detail in her lyrics, once the cornerstone of her power. Broad strokes can be just as emotionally potent as diaristic impulses, but from her earliest songs, her lyrics have always communicated a bracing amount of information in digestible fashion, a consistently stunning high-wire act.

The shift in emphasis from words to music on her recent albums has left her on less steady ground. But there is no Max Martin or Shellback here — superproducers who helped guide her recent pop tracks — which means no cheat code. And in her songwriting, in addition to Antonoff she collaborates with Louis Bell and Joel Little, who have been some of the most successful songwriters in pop over the last two years, but who don’t approach the power of Swift’s pointillism.

“Soon You’ll Get Better” captures that energy, though, and also points to a quiet thread on this album: There is country here — nods, winks. Swift’s ease with it is like flirting with an ex.