“It’s hard to be at a party when I feel like an open wound,” Taylor Swift sings on surprise new album folklore. “I just wanted you to know that this is me trying.”
Taylor Swift, the artist and public persona, has often worked in extremes: intense nostalgia, intense anger, intense adoration. But folklore resists the urge for theatrics and blunt-force trauma. Vocally, there’s no overproduction, no rogue cackle or sandpapery belt. Instrumentally, it’s Taylor at her most mild and restrained. But the mildness isn’t toothless.
Instead, it creates space for her emotive lyrics to wander outside the pop superhit constraints she has thrived in as of late. She proved she could succeed in a cage — now she can leave it.
Taylor’s eighth studio album arrived at midnight on July 24, less than 24 hours after she shared the news on Instagram. It’s the shortest album lead-up for Taylor by far; this is a musician who values a meticulous, winding rollout, with shocking lead singles and climactic speculation. The title of the album, folklore, is a fitting one. Taylor has been systematically building her own mythology for years through hidden messages in her lyric booklets, secret listening sessions, and poetic letters. She’s always building a context for her work to live inside.
This album exists specifically at this time for a reason, after all. It’s been almost a year since she released pop masterwork Lover. Usually, during the long album gaps, she takes on new stylistic or cultural inspirations: 1989 drew on ‘80s synth-pop and Polaroid filters, reputation featured trap-pop through a Game of Thrones lens, Lover peeled back her relationship with Joe Alwyn and pulled from references like Netflix rom-com Someone Great. She sets intentions and meets them, adjusting the goalpost each time.
When artists want to pivot to heightened sincerity, they go acoustic or “stripped-down.” To some degree, that’s the case here: folklore is a musical reaction to the whiplash of pop excess that Taylor embraced on her past three albums. Max Martin and Shellback are nowhere to be found. Instead, it’s familiar collaborator Jack Antonoff alongside Bon Iver, who co-wrote and features on “exile,” and Aaron Dessner, the songwriter and composer who performs with The National and who co-wrote or produced 11 folklore songs.
The overall sound is heavy on strings, quick-plucked guitars, mellow piano, and the riskiest it gets is with a harmonica. It’s more folky-alternative than she’s explored thus far, and closer to country storytelling than she’s been in a while. Her longtime admiration for Joni Mitchell is deeply felt. Folklore is character-driven, though it’s not always clear which voice is Taylor’s: maybe none of them, maybe all of them. She plays with history on songs like “The Last Great American Dynasty” (a retelling of the life of Rebekah West Harkness, the wildcard wife of a Standard Oil heir who “had a marvelous time ruining everything” and who used to live in the Rhode Island home Taylor now owns) and “Epiphany,” which she alluded to in an album letter was about her grandfather landing at Guadalcanal during WWII. It’s mostly not cloying, deftly playing with personal observations and a more journalistic way of scene-setting. “The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible,” she wrote in her letter. “Speculation, over time, becomes fact.”
She’s as interested in media and storytelling POVs as ever, whether it’s calling attention to her own public call-outs or providing multiple perspectives imagined from inside a love triangle. There are clues to the songs’ real-life inspirations. But the hints are somewhat more disguised than usual, and the interpretations are numerous, especially since many of Taylor’s public dramas share similar plot arcs. “All of my enemies started out friends,” she reminded us back on Lover. On “mad woman,” she drops cuts at yacht-partiers (maybe one (or two) in particular) and sings of what she’s had taken from her. “It's obvious that wanting me dead/Has really brought you two together,” she says, potentially a nod to Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta.
Though the sounds may be different on folklore, Taylor’s concise couplets are in signature form. “They told me all of my cages were mental/So I got wasted like all my potential,” she sings on the “this is me trying,” a cinematically ‘80s anthem for doing the best you f\*cking can. “I think I've seen this film before/And I didn't like the ending,” the lyrics ring out on the exquisite Bon Iver duet, “exile.”
The finale (not including the as-yet unreleased bonus track) of folklore, “hoax,” is an odd ending point for a Taylor album. She likes a conclusion that communicates a rebirth or a resolution: “Begin Again,” “Clean,” “New Year’s Day,” “Daylight.” “Hoax” is not a newly planted seed, though it is a moment of clarity. “Don't want no other shade of blue but you/No other sadness in the world would do” — It’s not a breathless fresh start, but it is a promise.
Altogether, Folklore comprises mini-narratives that shape themselves around the after effects of emotional blasts, those feelings that ricochet after the initial hit and the subsequent euphoric shock. It’s the album embodiment of sitting with uncomfortable feelings or with months of isolated self-reflection. It deals in sads big and small, but the big ones are treated so close and careful they feel fragile. Some are open wounds, and some are scars, and maybe neither are getting smaller, we’re just getting used to carrying them. It all can hurt the same, Taylor seems to shrug, this is me trying.
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