A review of Taylor’s 10th Album

Taylor Swift has done it again. Her tenth studio album “Midnights” was released last Friday with a whopping 118.6M streams, breaking the record for the biggest second-day streams for any album on Spotify in history surpassing “Donda” by Kanye West (102.1M).

“Midnights” is all about reflection. It’s the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout Swift’s life. Taylor Swift has described the project in her own poetic vernacular as “a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching – hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve … we’ll meet ourselves.”

Three hours later after the release of “Midnights,” Swift introduced “Midnights (3 am Edition), which features darker-sounding songs that weren’t on the original album, three hours after Midnights was released.

This is Swift’s first album to be recorded entirely with Jack Antonoff, after over a decade of collaborations. Swift shares in an Instagram post, “this is our first album we’ve done with just the two of us as main collaborators. We’d been toying with ideas and had written a few things we loved, but “Midnights” actually really coalesced and flowed out of us when our partners (both actors) did a film together in Panama. Jack and I found ourselves back in New York, alone, recording every night, staying up late and exploring old memories and midnights past.”
In the album, they experiment with moodier and more melancholy tones. Incorporating and producing vocal effects and vintage synths, all the while putting more of an emphasis on setting the mood than chasing trends.

“Midnights” is a cool, collected, and mature album that I have completely fallen in love with. It’s an album brilliantly made that mimics Swift’s racing thoughts, from being caught in a dazzling love story to scheming a revenge plot. Swift expresses, “Midnights is a collage of intensity, highs and lows and ebbs and flows. Life can be dark, starry, cloudy, terrifying, electrifying, hot, cold, romantic or lonely.” Just like Midnights, which is out now.