Taylor Swift Album Review: ‘Folklore’
Riya Yadav, INN/Gwalior, @infodeaofficial
Taylor Swift has a new sound, and it is refreshingly good
Taylor Swift is the undisputed queen of reinvention – she has deployed country references as a tease on the way to ecstatically saccharine, unmistakably pop hooks ( Fearless and Red) a RnB tilt on Reputation. And now , Taylor Swift has blessed her fans with a quarantine album that is far removed from the brand of pop we have grown accustomed to. Her new album, Folklore, is quintessential Taylor Swift , but moodier. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, Folklore finds the 30 year old singer songwriter teaming up with the National ‘s Aaron Dessner and long time collaborator, Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo- fi bedroom pop that is a far cry from its predecessor, Lover.
When Taylor Swift opens with The 1- a hybrid of plaintive piano and her natural moody delivery: “I ‘m doing good, I’m on some new shit” you would be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But, Swift has cancelled her considerable into writing songs here that sort of double as short stories and character studies.
From cardigan, which bears shades of Lana Del Ray to the heavy hearted ballad Exile (about doomed relationships, with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon), the album is a work of surprisingly good texture and imagination. At its best , the album establishes something that has been true from the start of Swift’s career: Her biggest strength is her storytelling, and her vivid imagination. And that is not all: The album has also broken the global record for first day album streams on Spotify by a female artist with 80.6 million streams, while surpassing 35 million streams on Apple Music a day after its release.
