Taylor Swift is in love and she is letting the world know in her latest full length LP, “Lover,” which was released on Aug. 23. Walking back from the darker themes and grittier production found all over her previous album, Taylor returns to form, delivering bombastic chorus after bombastic chorus on top of glittering synthesizer beats. 

The themes on this album are familiar ones to Swift fans. Love songs and heartache anthems have been Taylor’s lyrical bread and butter since the very beginning, when she burst onto the mainstream consciousness as a Nashville darling. This time around however, Swift’s romances are matured past the fleeting girlhood loves of “Tim McGraw” and “You Belong with Me.” She sings of lifelong companionship and anxieties associated with maintaining those long term relationships. The preoccupation about how her damaged reputation has now taken a backseat to bright celebrations of her lover and heartfelt contemplations of losing him.

Swift opens the album with “I Forgot That You Existed,” an ode to any who have slighted her in the past. Piano interpolated into a lighthearted synth loop back Swift’s bouncy delivery and sweet vocal melodies make up for the irony of Swift writing a song about how indifferent she is to her would be haters. 

The title track, “Lover,” is a floating waltz of a love song with a stripped back, reverbed acoustic arrangement and wandering bass. In the opening verse of the song, Swift gives an intimate account of creating a home with her significant other, a space only for them. “We could leave the Christmas lights ‘til January/This is our place, we make the rules.” Swift then delivers what is arguably her sharpest bridge in her discography. She references her and her lover’s past heartbreaks and how they have lead the couple to each other while evoking a sing song wedding vow, “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand?/With every guitar string scar on my hand/I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover/My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue.”

The middle of the tracklist is the absolute highlight of the album, with a series of roll-down-your-windows-and-blast-at-full-volume feel good pop jams. Swift drops a low, sassy vocal groove before exploding into a Carly Rae Jepsen-style chorus in the song “I Think He Knows.” 

“Paper Rings” features driving electric guitars, sparkling synths and a shout-along vocal bridge à la mid-2000’s Avril Lavigne. In an album filled with love songs “Cornelia Street,” is the truest love song of them all. In the piece, Swift considers how the pain of losing her significant other would affect her and whether she could ever go back to the places where she shared memories with her love.

The final leg of the album starts to drag with overproduced and redundant tracks such as “London Boy” and lead single “ME!”. “London Boy” is yet another song about how much Taylor Swift loves her boyfriend, but this time with eye rolling anglicisms and rugby. “ME!”, featuring Brendon Urie, feels overproduced and frenetic following the tight and catchy pop anthems Swift delivered earlier in the track listing. Her heartfelt and vulnerable lyrics are completely absent here, instead handing the audience line such as: “Hey, kids!/Spelling is fun!/Girl, there ain’t no I in “team”/But you know there is a me.”

At an hour long, “Lover” begins to feel bloated at parts and it would have served the album well to trim the fat. However, there exists a solid 45 minute album of Taylor Swift’s catchiest and most earnest songs to date.

Image from Taylor Swift via YouTube