The whole picture is right there from the start. In the first few seconds of "The Fate of Ophelia," track one on Taylor Swift's 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, a commanding drum fill sets up a dreamy keyboard line, and then comes the bass: huge and buoyant, like one of those bouncing balls in old cartoons that follow a song's lyrics and direct you to sing along. Swift takes a cue from that limber bottom and lets her voice dip and bend — she sounds smitten and a bit hungry as she recalls first contact with her now-forever lover, but also self-aware and playful, so sure of herself that she fills this latest confession with one-liners even as she knows her listeners will take it very seriously. "I heard you calling on the megaphone," she swoons. "You wanna see me aaall aloooone."

The reverb on the vocal makes this reverse come-on massive and intimate at the same time. Here's that showgirl of the album's title, drawing others in with a stage whisper. But she's also murmuring into the ear of that suitor who was able to "wrap around me like a chain, a crown, a vine." She tells him (we all know his name) that she's locked this memory away, but as he certainly knows, in a showgirl's world there's no secret so precious that it can't be converted into material. And anyway, the music is saying something more immediate: For the first time on a recording in a while, Swift is having fun. Her voice has never sounded stronger, the collaboration with her studio mates never easier. The bass and drum give off little signals about the musical terrain where the song has taken root — a shade of Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood" in the Omnichord, a touch of Stevie Nicks's "Stand Back" wafting through the melody, a slowed-down and more evenly modulated echo of Swift's own "Wildest Dreams."

We are in Max Martin's world, where musical epochs are compressed and connected within song structures that combine so many elements of Top 40 history that they come out sounding original. When Swift last entered this space along with Martin's then-protegé Shellback, also a producer on this release, she has said, she and the younger Swede were both gifted apprentices. Now, as The Life of A Showgirl makes clear, they are all equals.

Her time spent within Martin's zone helped Swift construct her own — alongside the realm of her counterpart Beyoncé, the most expansive and powerful one in what's left of the musical mainstream. Thirteen years after she reset the course of the streaming era with Red, Swift has reunited the team to tell a particular story, but also to make a spectacle of herself in full flower, at 35 as anchored and musically versatile as she's ever been. Her lyrics may focus on how her romance with fiancé Travis Kelce brought her back from a fatal heartbreak, but the bangers that are the point of The Life of a Showgirl trumpet another resurrection: Taylor Swift as Western pop's definitive presence, the star that couldn't be dimmed.

The album's credits show that Swift made Showgirl in relative isolation in Sweden, hiding out with her two multi-instrumentalist collaborators in between stops on one of the most elaborate concert tours in history. During her retreats into the studio she was thinking about the work and the values behind contemporary stardom. The album plays out this dynamic, Swift as mega-celebrity meeting Swift as studio artist, through airtight guaranteed hits that usurp the more muted explorations of her last few albums while letting the questions they ask linger in the background. Its chorus-driven bangers chase success while expressing doubts about its effects.

It's no accident that the album's first two songs evoke theatrical queens whose fates were either tragic or melodramatic — Ophelia, the juiciest ingenue role that costs your life, and Technicolor goddess Elizabeth Taylor, that violet-eyed over-emoter. Taylor was not a showgirl but a serious actress whose public image was distorted by a pain-filled private life (especially her tumultuous relationship with fellow actor Richard Burton) that fed the beast of tabloid journalism in the mid-20th century.

Always a business woman, Swift deploys the showgirl trope partly because it presents her aging audience with an adult version of the sparkles they donned for her as teens. It also depicts showbiz as a fighting arena. No longer the emerging auteur who looked to rappers to help her negotiate her reputation on the Martin-produced 2017 album of that name, Swift picks up the feather headdress to consider what defining herself in the spotlight has cost her. She sees a way out through love. But fear lingers; that didn't work when Liz pledged all to Dick, or when Ophelia floated down the river again and again.

The Life of a Showgirl arrives at a moment that seems illogical on the surface, but which makes sense in light of Swift's inexhaustible ambition. She and NFL hunk Kelce announced their engagement just over a month ago, and if the synth-y power ballad "Wi$h Li$t" is to be believed, she's ready to "have a couple kids" and "tell the world to leave us the f*** alone." A good chunk of Showgirl has little to do with its overarching concept, instead consisting of straight-ahead love songs that any couple who meets in their 30s could appreciate. At first listen, these mash notes celebrate the private space she and Kelce have created together — even the fact that the two overexposed lovebirds have done so is a miracle, a little hard to believe.

But notice how Swift connects the Travis odes to her own previous love declarations, erasing those old amours with this update. "Eldest Daughter," a wedding song for the ages, goes all the way back to the "careful daughter" Swift was in 2010's "Mine," while "Wi$h Li$t" points toward the song structure of her 2014 hit "Style." Martin and Shellback's production work reinforces the idea that this album is a summation, not merely of Swift's career but of pop itself — the "Happy Days" nostalgia of "Opalite" (which quotes The Ronettes' famous "Be My Baby" chorus) and Shellback's Motown bass in "Ruin the Friendship" are just two examples of how Showgirl dials into their way of jumping eras to create a total pop experience. If Swift sees Showgirl as a soft announcement of her stepping back from the stage, she's going to be thorough. No one is more conscious of the legacy she's building than she is; a compulsive big thinker, she lives to recontextualize successes and close loops.

She's definitely aiming for closure about her immediate artistic and personal past. While some fans (including me) applauded The Tortured Poets' Department, the sprawling, lyrically and sonically raw reckoning with her shattered connections to not one but two Englishmen who disappointed her and rearranged her head, that 2024 album was Swift's first critical near-whiff since she'd parted with Martin after Reputation and grown her critical clout in league with producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. The five original albums she made during that period enhanced Swift's profile as a singer-songwriter and sonic adventurer, but her graceful slide into a more conventional idea of seriousness threatened to endanger her dominance as the queen of pop. (Beyoncé solved a similar problem by exploring different genres, expanding her range, especially globally.) Meanwhile, the first generation of direct Swift inheritors, most notably Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, began to challenge her both on the charts and as media sensations. The Life of a Showgirl directly responds to these developments by reasserting her ability to make irresistibly singable, danceable hits while sacrificing none of the conceptual chops she'd developed in her folkish, disco-y, Joni Mitchell-esque days.

All of Swift's albums since her first effort with Martin, Red, operate on two levels thematically: one, confessional — what her life is teaching her in that period — and two, conceptual — what larger frame might fit around her autofictions. On Showgirl, the tough-broad persona of a greasepaint survivor allows her to temper the almost too earnest tenderness she feels about her unexpected fulfillment with Kelce and to address matters that have long preoccupied her, especially the issue of personal loyalty among the friendly rivals of the entertainment world.

On both topics, the showgirl character allows Swift to take some wild swings. As an unabashed celebration of the emotional and sexual fulfillment she's found at Kelce's side and in his bed, the album goes so far that it includes a risque ode to the tight end's anatomy called (cough) "Wood," ripe with images of redwood trees and, nodding toward his popular podcast, "New Heights of manhood." Happy for you, Taylor! If Sabrina Carpenter's success as a 21st-century flapper posed the challenge to be more frank that Swift needed, I congratulate her for rising to the occasion. Sex talk is often a little cringeworthy; it's kind of sweet that Swift just goes for it.

While her relatively recent turn toward the ribald is still sometimes awkward, where Swift runs into trouble on Showgirl is in the by-now familiar terrain of the Swiftian diss song. "CANCELLED!" is a Disney-esque gothic anthem about valuing personal fealty above all else, including, it's implied, political allegiances. Swift doubling down on her credo that bad bitches have each others' backs and will defeat anyone who crosses them is no surprise — she did it a decade-plus ago with her notorious girl-squad video for "Bad Blood" — but she must know that to invoke the word "canceled" is to invite a political read, something Swift generally avoids. It will trouble some people, only making sense as a deployment of that showgirl character, one tough broad who takes no guff from her rivals and knows exactly when a supposed friend is out to get her.

The same is true of "Actually Romantic," a sarcastic and weirdly cruel attack on a perceived pop rival (the steaming hot gossip says it's her ex Matty Healy's pal Charli XCX). The fear of women as undermining competitors is a trope that often plays out within the story of the showgirl — see the paradigmantic Hollywood version, All About Eve, and its '90s successor, the aptly named campfest Showgirls, for examples. There's a "no new friends" feeling emanating from this album's meaner moments that gestures toward the divisiveness that generally afflicts our culture in 2025. It's very possible that Swift is leaning into pettiness and even bad taste as a way of further fleshing out the spotlight-hardened character she's exploring. But to send such messages now is a choice.

Swift has honed her blade more carefully when it comes to taking down men who've done her wrong. "Father Figure," one of the album's trickiest and most evocative tracks, is a ballad kissed with strings and constructed around an almost martial drumbeat. It pursues another favorite Swift subject, her negative experiences with men in the music biz, exchanging the vulnerability of her 2020 song about her ex- label head Scott Borchetta, "My Tears Ricochet," for the sharper tone of a woman who's muscled up and is now determined to deliver blows instead of absorbing them. Built around an interpolation of the melody that George Michael made famous in his irresistible (if … questionable) ode to an age-gap relationship with the same name, "Father Figure" starts wounded and then pulls out the knife. The quaver in Swift's voice, enhanced by the track's airy production and that famous tidal hook, hardens quickly and assuredly as she twists the song's metaphor: Turns out she is the father figure, the one possessing a manhood that intimidates. Threatening her former mentor in no uncertain terms, Swift plays on a line from the exquisite Tortured Poets study of fame's costs, "Clara Bow," to show that tender things do sometimes grow into their power. She leaves her traitorous mentor to sleep with the fishes, snarling over her shoulder, "This empire belongs to me."

Despite these Darth Vader moments, Showgirl is generally a sunny album, its pleasure rooted in its basic motivations: Swift's happiness with Kelce and her joy in flexing in the studio with Martin and Shellback. The love songs that set its mood are unreservedly sexy and most of all funny — including that dirty "Wood" — expressing genuine affection and delight. Showgirl also offers a couple of signature memory songs, one a classic that could have been on almost any of her albums and another adroitly up-to-date.

"Ruin the Friendship" returns Swift to the period in which her career began, and which she has continued to favor, adolescence, as she recalls a boy she was too shy to kiss, now dead. "As the 50 Cent song played, should've kissed you anyway" is an immortal Swift line, embarrassingly specific and completely believable. She and her collaborators weave this sad little daydream into a classic Martin arrangement, redolent of everything from New Edition teen pop to '90s country to Swift's own first hits, those teenage heartbursts.

The concluding title track is different: Driven by a slow handclap and building like a peppy, feminized "Nights In White Satin" — get out those lighters! — it carries its two protagonists, Swift and guest star Carpenter, through girlish dreams and hard-knock nights to a climax that's both triumphant and, if not bitter, definitely seasoned with some salty tears. Back in 2017, Swift would have left the cruelest lines out of these lyrics — she would have never called another woman a bitch, given that she fought against others using that word against her. Now she lets the showgirl in her admit that sometimes she thinks of her competition that way, and realizes the cost of such ruthlessness. "I'm immortal now," she sings to the "baby dolls" who wish she'd "hurry up and die." Then comes the punchline, as sharp as a programmed beat. "I couldn't if I tried." Motherhood and semi-retirement may be looming in Taylor Swift's fantasies, but she's clearly uncertain if it's really in her cards. She'll stay our showgirl, idolized and despised. The mix grows deafening and she walks offstage into her sweetheart's arms, seeking an unlikely redemption. Thank you, she says with a rueful smile, for the lovely bouquet.

Copyright 2025, NPR