The theme of Taylor Swift’s Lover is right there in the title. These 18 songs are odes to the things she loves most and knows best: her boyfriend and her mom, the West Village and the West End, and, always and forever on a Taylor Swift album, being in love. It’s an exuberant celebration of the challenges of maintaining a relationship through seasons and across continents, of telling the truth and saying sorry. Swift has always mined her personal life for opaque fables of love and retribution; she memorializes a romance’s fleeting details, wraps them in bows, and ferries them to an audience eager to receive her gifts. She writes about a life that’s strengthened, not broken, by heartbreak. Lover is the suggestion that the right person, the right song, might lift heartbreak from your life, too. The concept is, as she claims early on, both “overdramatic and true.”

Lover nods to 2017’s reputation, but in spirit, it’s the sequel to the synth-pop glitter of 1989. Produced mostly with ubiquitous pop whisperer Jack Antonoff, it’s full of low-lying synthesizer pulses and reverbed beats that can feel more like scaffolding than full songs. Sometimes it attempts to honor Swift’s entire artistic journey at once: The waltzing “Lover,” full of fiddle and fairytale weddings, harks back to the Old Taylor; “I Think He Knows” is a thumping electro-pop shout-out to Nashville’s Music Row. She uses the word “shade” twice, up from once on reputation. She’s 29, but she still writes metaphors about prom dresses and homecoming queens. It’s bright and fun and occasionally cloying.

Lover’s emotional peaks and valleys are higher and deeper than reputation, where romance played out under a long shadow of doubt. Opener “I Forgot That You Existed” is a hopscotch rhythm set to a rhyme like you’d leave in your nemesis’ yearbook if you were really being honest—which is to say, it doesn’t sound like she forgot for one second. It comes off as throat-clearing, but it opens a stretch of drama-free delights, like the magnetic pink glow of “Cruel Summer” (“I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you!”) and the crystal-ball clarity of “The Archer,” with its elegant, Chromatics-esque synthesizer build and self-aware regret: “I cut off my nose just to spite my face/And I hate my reflection for years and years.” The exception is undercooked gender-equality anthem “The Man,” a song that hilariously, unironically points to Leonardo DiCaprio’s playboy image as the height of masculine privilege, and proves that other people shouldn’t write Kesha songs.

Is it the prickly cotton-candy production or the lyrical detail or the vocal echo or just the event album-ness of it all that keeps Lover in the foreground, song after song? With the possible exception of the steel drums on music-box oddball “It’s Nice to Have a Friend,” the album never claims any new ground; some of its best moments are unavoidably familiar. Rihanna or Robyn might intend their new music to sound entirely fresh; Swift, our most conventional pop star, builds atop what has worked already. And with Antonoff behind so much of the sound of pop music in the latter half of the decade, the bold, ’80s-inspired style isn’t inherently more interesting or varied than any other. “I Think He Knows” sounds like Carly Rae Jepsen; “The Archer” sounds like Lorde’s “Supercut”; “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” actually a Joel Little joint, sounds like Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die.

Swift and her collaborators try some real doozies: Pop-punk marriage proposal “Paper Rings” has a key change borrowed from the Shangri-Las and more than a little acoustic guitar in the mix. It’s cute, and then exhausting. The perky, England-themed “London Boy” begins sweetly—“I saw the dimples first and then I heard the accent”—but devolves into a parade of rugby and high tea and “I fancy you”s, a love song as predictable as one of Mary-Kate and Ashley’s direct-to-video European adventures. She samples Idris Elba joking about taking James Corden on a scooter ride, apropos of nothing except that he says “London.” I can only imagine what it sounds like to a Brit.

“London Boy” is relentlessly upbeat, but the next mood swing will knock you sideways: It’s “Soon You’ll Get Better,” a heartrending ballad about Swift’s mother’s ongoing cancer battle, with background harmonies by the Dixie Chicks. Three minutes later, her tender testimony of new faith is outshined by the terrific “False God,” a moody sophistipop meditation on transatlantic romance where worship (“Religion’s in your lips… the altar is my hips”) sounds more like a metaphor for…. oral sex? On a Taylor Swift album? Am I losing my mind? Then “You Need to Calm Down” crashes in to remind us that she also considers making nice with Katy Perry to be a form of activism.

Because Swift is better when she’s learning than when she’s trying to teach us a lesson, Lover’s garish lead singles contribute to the strain. I’ve thought about “ME!” every day for four months; it still sounds like a musical number taken out of context, just unearned celebratory fanfare without plot or character development, so dead-eyed it’s spooky. But she’s better when she gives herself real space to think, as on “Cornelia Street,” a lovely, understated tribute to memory and nostalgia with the power to make one rarefied block of Manhattan feel universal.

Like Red or Speak Now, Lover is a sprawling scrapbook of invisible personal bookmarks, an escapist fantasy about a real-life celebrity boyfriend, a shrewd self-mythology disguised as a benevolent offering. It’s probably five bad songs away from being better than 1989. It’s also a little wiser and more emotionally honest. “I once believed love would be black and white… I once believed love would be burning red/But it’s golden,” she sings on dreamy pastel closer “Daylight,” replacing the fiery passion of Red with a gentler, more mature understanding of true love as a good idea you don’t want to stop having. Heartbreak can strengthen you; love sustains you. If only all of Lover had the same heart.

Buy: Rough Trade

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