The deluxe version of Taylor Swift’s seventh studio album comes with a facsimile of the singer’s journal. It contains selected diary entries that make for surprisingly glum reading. We see Swift progress from wide-eyed 13-year-old (“I heart school!”) to one of the world’s biggest stars: the latter the source of considerable woe. There are complaints about fans outside her house, worries about her relationships failing due to “the nasty world that just wants to ruin things” and about 2016, when her personal woes, including her mother’s cancer diagnosis, were compounded by public spats with other artists – most notably Kanye West – a succession of think-pieces bemoaning her awfulness and, most mind-boggling of all, her unsolicited adoption as a figurehead of the American alt-right after she declined to endorse a presidential candidate. “This summer,” she writes, from the thick of it, “is the apocalypse.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The cover of Lover

The album that resulted from said apocalypse, 2017’s Reputation, was a messy, uneven explosion of bitterness and cynicism amid the love songs, on which Swift’s desire for public redress sometimes overwhelmed her songwriting smarts: you could understand why her mouth tended to purse itself into a cat’s bum of disapproval, but by the time you got to This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, a dressing-down of a former friend now expelled from Swift’s life of champagne-swilling luxury, it was hard not to wish she’d give it a rest. Under these circumstances, you’d be forgiven for heaving a weary sigh as Lover’s opening track I Forgot That You Existed springs into life. We seem to be back exactly where we left off: another perfidious ex-pal getting it in the neck, to the accompaniment of jaunty piano and brittle-sounding laughter.

It’s a strange way to open Lover, because it’s a misnomer: if Swift can’t keep the lemon out of her gob entirely – You Need to Calm Down is a forgettable bit of how-dare-you, in which the actions of celeb-baiting internet trolls get mixed up with those of homophobes – the tone of Lover is noticeably different from its predecessor, the bitterness largely expunged in favour of besotted paeans to her British partner, actor Joe Alwyn. He gets hymned in every conceivable way, from the Mazzy Star-ish title track to London Boy, on which an artist once unironically labelled America’s Sweetheart slips charmingly into the British vernacular – it’s all “down the pub” this and “his best mate” that and “I fancy you” the other.

Indeed, it’s tempting to say he’s hymned a little too much. The big problem with Lover is that it’s too long, the suspicion being that Swift is trying to reassert her commercial dominance by spread-betting. Reputation represented a relative sales wobble, shifting a mere 4.5m copies as opposed to 1989’s 10m, and she’s recently signed a new record deal, of which Lover is the first fruit. Fans who like her best in snarkily defensive mode can wallow in I Forgot That You Existed and You Need to Calm Down. Listeners who pine for the less-knowing Swift, her lyrical focus on romance, are thrown a bone in the widescreen, St Vincent-assisted synth pop of Cruel Summer, which fixes her relationship with Alwyn in terms of sneaking in through garden gates and drunk tears in the back of a car. Those who think it all went wrong when she left Nashville and fixed her sights on pop can console themselves with Soon You’ll Get Better, a gorgeous, hushed country ballad about her mother’s illness, bedecked with banjo, fiddle and backing vocals by the Dixie Chicks.

Those who want her to be a straightforward mainstream pop star, meanwhile, get the single Me!, which nearly hospitalises itself trying to be a crowd-rousing anthem built in the image of The Greatest Showman soundtrack. You can understand the pragmatic impulse to cover every base, but not even Taylor Swift, usually possessed of far higher quality control than her peers, can muster enough knockout tunes to fill 18 tracks. The bravura displays of songwriting – not least The Archer, a brilliant, echo-drenched exercise in mounting tension that teases, but never reaches, an explosive climax – are padded out with pretty lightweight stuff: Death By a Thousand Cuts, by-numbers pop elevated a little by a piano part that flutters delicately in the background; the new wave-y misfire Paper Rings.

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Meanwhile, another section of her fanbase – those who keep loudly insisting that Swift fix her lyrical gaze on bigger issues – are certainly catered for. We’re living through one of those weird moments in history when it’s deemed that pop stars need to have Something to Say About the State of Things. Perhaps noting the ensuing acres of guff suggesting most of them they haven’t got anything original or thought-provoking to say at all, Swift has thus far declined to join in, but here changes her mind. The feminist-flavoured The Man has an If I Were a Boy-esque lyrical conceit, snappy and exasperated in equal measure. Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince, meanwhile, is one of the best things here, not a phrase regularly associated with pop’s attempts to get to grips with the horrors of 2019. It takes a classic Swift lyrical trope – the Springsteen-y one in which two young sweethearts vow to leave their small town – and retools it to reflect the abandon-ship despair engendered by Trump’s America. Audibly indebted to Lana Del Rey, it’s infinitely smarter and subtler than anything her peers can manage when pushing the button marked “woke”.

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That said, Lover’s highlights come when Swift ignores the outside world, whether that’s politics, public image or the desire to reassert her pop dominance. False God is beautiful and strangely subdued: an introverted small-hours love song on which a rambling sax solo weaves around Swift’s voice. It’s Nice to Have a Friend, meanwhile, sounds like nothing else Swift has made before, a brief sliver of a song set to samples of steel pan, tubular bells and a Canadian kids’ choir. They hint at another album, buried amid Lover’s landslide of styles and lyrical approaches, more subtle and low-key and experimental, but potentially more satisfying.

As it is, Lover offers plenty of evidence that Swift is just a better songwriter than any of her competitors in the upper echelons of pop, but its something-for-everyone approach feels like consolidation, not progress, designed to keep Swift as one of the world’s biggest stars without provoking the kind of backlash that led her to start evoking the end of days in her diary.