What can we expect from Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl?

Like an anti-Victoria Beckham (noted hater of her husband’s football career), Taylor Swift has appeared on her NFL boyfriend Travis Kelce’s podcast to discuss her upcoming 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, to be released on October 3.

If listening to meatheads blabber for two hours while the world’s biggest star benevolently gives their viewership numbers an artificial bump isn’t your idea of a good time, just know that Taylor gave us vital details around the new album. Here’s our premature evaluation.

The return of Taylor Swift, pure pop paragon
Let’s face it, The Life of a Showgirl is already on track to be Taylor Swift’s third-best album thanks to two words: Max Martin. The Swedish pop supremo and his producing partner Shellback – who were responsible for the best bits on Swift’s best albums, Reputation and 1989 (yes, in that order) – are the credited producers on every track on the new album, confirming what everyone suspected after Swift this week shared a Spotify playlist highlighting their biggest hits for her, from 22 to Wildest Dreams. On her boyfriend’s podcast, Swift said she recorded the album in Sweden during the European leg of her Eras tour and promised “bangers”.

It proves that Taylor reads her own reviews. After the Matty Healy-yearning fizzer that was The Tortured Poets Department, the critical consensus was that her once-fruitful relationship with producer Jack Antonoff had run its course, stalled at mid-tempo moodiness, and that she needed a refresh.

Returning to the glory of yore might seem a reductive move, but let’s not forget that Max Martin doesn’t sleep: his recent work on Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine and The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow – including the pre-album smash Dancing in the Flames – show he’s still got the Swede-est touch.

Doing it with a broken heart?
The highlight of Taylor’s Tortured Poets era – beyond proving she has great taste in men – was I Can Do it with a Broken Heart, the album’s second single and longest-charting hit. Its success surely inspired Taylor’s latest pop pivot. She added the song to her Eras tours last year, complete with a showgirl aesthetic: feathers, canes and Old Hollywood glamour, which led me to assume that Taylor loved Margot Robbie’s Babylon.

The Life of a Showgirl’s album cover – showing a sexy Swift near-drowning in a bathtub – seems to point to that song’s ideas: the lonely grind behind the glamorous pop life. As do the album’s typically evocative track titles, including The Fate of Ophelia, Elizabeth Taylor and Cancelled!. Bubblegum pop with a sour centre: it’s the best flavour.

But is it a head fake? On the podcast, Swift said the album was inspired by the “infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in my life” during her Eras tour and Kelce courtship, and said “that effervescence has come through on this record”. OK, so why are you drowning in a bathtub on the cover, surrounded by the font from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette then?

The ache of Blake? A dump on Trump?
The tabloids, eager for headlines, have suggested Taylor takes a stab at her one-time best friend, actor Blake Lively, who had dragged Swift into her legal drama with It Ends with Us director Justin Baldoni last year. “There are Easter eggs about how she overcame the drama with Blake. And she does in her own way address people who believed her relationship with Travis was a PR stunt,” an “insider” told the Daily Mail.

They also said Swift – who endorsed Kamala Harris in the US presidential election last year – gets political on the album. “Taylor has a point to prove and is ready to silence people who said her career has ‘broke’ because she went ‘woke’,” the insider said, which is definitely the kind of sentence a trustworthy human might tell a tabloid magazine.

Reclaiming recession pop’s throne
Recession pop – escapist pop built on hedonistic hooks and booming BPMs, a rejoinder to a depressing political and cultural landscape – has returned to rule the charts, and you can’t fault Swift for wanting her piece.

Lady Gaga had an acclaimed return “reheating nachos” from her pop past – including How Bad Do U Want Me, a hit that blatantly channelled 1989-era Swift. Meanwhile, Swift’s protege Sabrina Carpenter – the only other artist set to be featured on The Life of a Showgirl – suddenly became music’s biggest star with her brand of playful, slinky pop.

You can picture Swift watching this and thinking, “Thanks for keeping the throne warm, but I’m back now”, which is good news for us all. Is it October 3 yet?

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