Taylor Swift (2006)
In a pair of cowboy boots, 16-year-old Taylor Swift stepped into Nashville’s nation music scene, launched her eponymous debut album and adjusted pop music. Swift’s debut is commonly written off for her extreme vocal twangs and banjo thrives, however singles reminiscent of Tim McGraw, Teardrops on My Guitar and Our Music, which rocketed up each the nation and pop charts in 2006, have stood the take a look at of almost twenty years.
Lots of the lyrical motifs that recur all through Swift’s discography have roots in her debut: Chilly as You’s pouring rain; Mary’s Music’s 2am time test; Our Music’s meta tackle inventive inspiration. The subtle songwriting of her debut stays spectacular nevertheless it was Swift’s expression of adolescent emotional depth that related with younger listeners like me.
Right now, with the likes of Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish dominating pop, the concept of an adolescent making music for different youngsters is commonplace. However in 2006, it was cohorts of middle-aged males who had been writing the songs that represented the adolescent expertise – the Excessive Faculty Musical soundtrack was the best-selling album of that yr. For a era, Swift’s debut was the primary time we heard our experiences – painful loneliness, romantic craving, even physique dysmorphia – taken severely in songwriting by one among our personal. Katie Goh
Fearless (2008)
Name the world’s nice physicists and inform them to cease making an attempt to invent a time-machine: it exists, and it’s Swift’s second studio album, Fearless. Press play and also you’re instantly transported again to excessive (OK, secondary) faculty, again to – as Swift herself places it – “the bliss and devastation of youth”. Like faculty itself, all the album seems like a cusp – not solely was this an vital step in Swift’s transition from nation to pop, however the lyrics seize the push and pull of teenage life, a time when fairytales nonetheless appear potential however boys repeatedly lie about loving you.
Nowhere is that this higher mirrored that within the track Fifteen, with a lyric so belt-able that it’s best to be capable of hook it via your denims: “In your life, you’ll do issues higher than courting the boy on the soccer crew. However I didn’t realize it at 15!” (And OK, elsewhere there’s greater than a little bit misogyny on this album – however it’s the catchy sort!)
Additionally, we can not and shouldn’t decide an artist’s best period by their hair, however it could be remiss to not shout out locks so golden and bouncy that you simply half anticipate three bears to storm the stage, promise to let Swift end and inform her off for consuming their porridge. There’s a purpose Fearless propelled an 18-year-old Swift to international superstardom and it’s as a result of songs about fancying boys and them not fancying you again are the world’s best artwork type. I do know it now – and I knew it at 15. Amelia Tait
Speak Now (2010)
Communicate Now could be the Quick & Livid of Swift albums: even its ballads transfer with a breakneck momentum. Largely forgoing the swooning nation of Fearless in favour of driving, muscular power-pop, the songs right here – written solely by Swift, with out co-writers – are finely and tightly constructed, heavy with stress and stuffed with stunning final-act perspective shifts. The near-seven-minute Pricey John, a brutal and righteously vengeful assassination in ballad type, is simply as spectacularly gripping as The Story of Us, a racing pop-punk kiss-off. Even the songs which might be clear fantasies, such because the twee wedding-crashing title monitor, construct to propulsive finales.

Every time I return to Communicate Now, I discover myself caught off-guard by simply how exacting Swift’s knife was at this time limit. On Imply, she eviscerates critics with the identical sharp, plainspoken poetics of her idol Natalie Maines of the Chicks. Enchanted pulls the wide-eyed fairytales of Fearless into the actual world. Even the sneering pop-punk monitor Higher Than Revenge – which has since been dinged by followers for its considerably retrograde gender politics – is vastly higher than it will get credit score for, touchdown some brilliantly bratty blows (“No quantity of classic clothes offers you dignity”) and exhibiting an early instance of Swift’s talent for slipping into seemingly disparate genres at will.
Communicate Now could be the forgotten center youngster of Swift’s albums, touchdown proper between beloved juggernauts Fearless and Purple, however with every passing yr it feels increasingly more like my favorite of her information: a breathless, exhilarating thrill journey. Shaad D’Souza
Red (2012)
If Swift’s early-career flip of fairytale narratives had felt a little bit Disney, then Purple is a Nora Ephron film, assembling and magnifying exact particulars into swooping storytelling arcs. There’s a wide ranging sense of scale to its forward-thinking forays into EDM, dubstep and country-rock, with grand swells of emotion masterfully calibrated to hit pop’s bullseye. The notion of “fortunately ever after” is a false god, she had realised; what was actual was to write down a heroine bruised by love and holding on to fragments of hope, as she does on Start Once more. Or, in All Too Nicely, to ship a relationship postmortem so richly devastating that Stanford college now runs a course on it.
She would later lean into villainy, however Swift throughout her Purple period knew {that a} burn is most savage when masquerading as aloe: “Loving him is like driving a brand new Maserati down a dead-end avenue,” as she sings on the title monitor. And the album marks the beginning of a Swiftian signature: the indelible goofy apart. There is no such thing as a “I’m the problem it’s me” with out We Are By no means Ever Getting Again Collectively’s “like, ever”. It takes a 22-year-old’s good audacity to assert a complete color of the rainbow, and on Purple, Swift appeared made from starlight, channelling intense emotion and inventive starvation into her first actually nice period. Owen Myers
1989 (2014)
When Swift introduced 1989, she described it as her “very first documented, official pop album”. And what a pop album it’s. Polished and exact, 1989 eschewed modern musical and cultural touchstones, its nostalgic bent in direction of stadium-sized energy pop and crisp synthesised electronics serving to Swift carve out her personal area of interest in a panorama that was dominated by R&B crossover and EDM.
Whereas such grand musical vaults and gimlet-eyed willpower to overcome the charts resulted in Swift dialling down a few of the diaristic specificity discovered on Purple, it additionally made for enormous, all-encompassing choruses: the impeccable Italo disco of Fashion (one among her finest songs), the swooning heartbeats of Wildest Goals or the euphoric refrain of New Romantics. Swift’s storytelling additionally bled into the manufacturing: the fizziness of Clean Area, with its winking pen-click, allowed her to self-mythologise with humour somewhat than bitterness, whereas the musical world created in Out of the Woods transports you to the second in her relationship when the brakes had been hit too quickly.
In fact, 1989 was additionally the marginally regrettable period of lady squads, feuds and “please welcome to the stage”. Nevertheless it must be remembered for being Swift’s boldest musical leap. It’s a danger that few pop stars would take at the moment. Alim Kheraj
Karma (2016)

after publication promotion
Reputation (2017)
After I first heard Look What You Made Me Do, the lead single from Fame, I cringed. Gothic melodrama sounded so gauche on Swift: the lyrics’ emphatic cadence didn’t go well with her voice, and its brattiness was utterly out of sync along with her typical ingratiating sleekness. In time, I realised that was a part of its genius, particularly when taken as a part of Fame. Made following Swift’s annus horribilis (backlash in opposition to her surface-y feminism and accusations that she was some type of Trumpian accent; her beef with Kim and Kanye pushed to boiling level) Fame was a comic book heel-turn that refigured Swift’s embattled persona as a panto villain. However her dragged-up sixth act ended up releasing her from a few of the strictures – personally and societally imposed – that had landed her there within the first place.

Feeling hated gave Swift much less to lose. It let her develop up: she discarded the likability and chasteness that had outlined her profession to take greater swings, unleashing feelings she had beforehand held in: carnal want, rage, unfettered vindictiveness, F-you-I’ll-take-my-ball-home. She tried out totally different voices and welded her songwriting to rap’s exhausting edges in a approach that, not like most pop star-goes-rap grifts, truly labored. On her subsequent album Lover she would sing explicitly – and somewhat obviously – concerning the double requirements that ladies face; nevertheless it’s simpler right here, the place you are feeling her anger within the deliciously petulant smack of I Did One thing Dangerous, Don’t Blame Me and that livid lead single. (The massive tantrum power, at the least on Fame’s first half, feels fairly affordable now when you concentrate on what she was subjected to within the media.) It additionally generated her most enjoyable stay present, taking Kim Kardashian’s “snake” barb and blowing it up into a big inflatable serpent known as Karyn that loomed from the again of the stage.
Being at all-time low, in fact, additionally gave Swift the whole lot to achieve. Fame dodges bitterness due to its devotional second half, the place she appears surprised and grateful to have found love in the course of all this angst. The gasping Gown (her first truly attractive track) and the fun of quiet privateness in New Yr’s Day are amongst her perfect. Swift thrives when she feels issues extraordinarily deeply, as she does right here: Fame is the flash of her armour and the wounded coronary heart behind the breastplate; she lashes out however lacerates herself as a lot as anybody else. The title of Swift’s sixth album mirrored on how perceptions of her had “by no means been worse” – however at the moment she will be able to stake her inventive repute on it. Laura Snapes
Lover (2019)
Because the quote-tweets on that viral Wango Tango performance of Me! from 2018 can attest, Lover just isn’t essentially the album that the majority Swift followers are most determined to listen to stay. Nonetheless, once you pluck away the layers of radioactive Kraft-slice cheese, Swift’s seventh effort is a report of endearing significance, a kitschy second of triumph after she left her outdated report label, a transfer that prompted her to re-record her again catalogue.
Shedding the reptilian pores and skin of Fame, Lover is all about rebirth, swapping moody revenge for synthy enjoyable. Whether or not exhibiting like to the LGBTQ+ neighborhood (You Have to Calm Down), poking enjoyable at unhealthy gender norms (The Man) or espousing the virtues of courting somebody British with realizing anglophone references (London Boy), Swift readily embraces sunshine and rainbows, leaning into the affirmation of newfound love.
There may be some steadiness: Quickly You’ll Get Higher, about her mom’s most cancers analysis, is a sobering second of vulnerability, whereas the fragility of Merciless Summer season, concerning the early courting stage of a relationship, is well one among her most interesting songs, constructing to the type of earnest staccato hook that’s now her signature ending transfer: “I don’t wanna maintain secrets and techniques simply to maintain you!” Not each monitor is a must-hear however the fantastic thing about Lover is what it brings to Swift’s sonic sandwich: texture, chunk and a beneficiant sprinkling of sugar. Jenessa Williams
Folklore and Evermore (2020)
Sooner or later within the final decade, I resigned myself to the truth that I’ll observe wherever Swift leads me. By no means has this been more true than on Folklore/Evermore, a two-album period containing many parts that I might often discover profoundly triggering – acoustic guitars! Self-conscious lowercase titles! Male vocalists! – but continues to captivate me.
It didn’t damage that Swift’s most introspective albums arrived throughout a time of nice turmoil for me personally (sure, I’m referring to the pandemic). However additionally they discovered her at her most relaxed. Minus the exhausting parade of Easter eggs and company tie-ins that preceded Lover, Swift’s shock lockdown albums marked an sudden however welcome handbrake flip. Whereas her storytelling had sometimes centred on autobiography, Folklore noticed her increase her attain to embody eccentric heiresses, murderous husbands and a three-song story arc a few teenage love triangle. (It’s a testomony to her evolution as a songwriter that listeners are as invested within the fictional Betty’s cardigan as they had been within the a lot mythologised scarf of Purple’s All Too Nicely.)
Elsewhere, acquainted themes – longing, the lack of innocence, the ethical decrepitude of Scooter Braun – are accompanied by cinematic orchestrations and sweeping melodies, to not point out three career-best bridges on August, My Tears Ricochet and This Is Me Attempting. Immediately staying indoors didn’t appear so unhealthy. Joe Stone
Midnights (2022)
Swift has made so many albums in so many various genres that evaluating them is hard. However in case you needed to nominate one as her finest, Midnights has a powerful declare. It doesn’t have the rapid influence of the fizzing, offended Fame or the sudden left-turn enchantment of Folklore. It’s surprisingly subdued by trendy pop requirements: low on licensed bangers, large on muted atmospherics (there’s even a touch of shoegaze concerning the guitars on Maroon) and restraint, as evidenced by the Lana Del Rey duet Snow on the Seaside, which is so low-key that it upset Del Rey followers anticipating a showstopping visitor look.
However what it has in profusion is implausible songs: You’re on Your Personal Child’s sharp depiction of the teenage Swift struggling to interrupt out in Nashville; Anti-Hero’s small-hours self-loathing; the spectacular mixture of candy tunefulness and spite on Karma. There are songs that show Swift’s talent as a author – her depiction of a drunken dialog on Query…? all of a sudden quickens and stops rhyming – and songs that deal in experimentation, not least the warping of her voice till it sounds male on Midnight Rain. It’s an album that doesn’t want to stick to trendy pop’s guidelines and requirements as a result of the fabric on it demonstrates Swift is miles forward of her friends: a assured, mature victory lap. Alexis Petridis