Taylor Swift released her twelfth studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” on Friday, Oct. 3, 2025. The album had been preceded by an suspenseful buildup from Swift’s team.
Swift’s fans are notorious for their ability to hunt down Easter eggs in the minute details of her social media and website. Fans had managed to predict the announcement date of “The Life of a Showgirl” as early as October of 2024, when Swift posted a video with an A12 sign clearly visible in the background. As fans had anticipated, the album was announced on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025.
This was followed by more hints: posts with 12 photos, orange outfits, a mysterious countdown on Swift’s website, and a post captioned “thiiiiiiiiiiiis” that of course had 12 “i’s.” Additionally, Swift recently announced her engagement to Travis Kelce. This only further excited fans hoping for a departure from the gloominess of her last album, “The Tortured Poets Department.”
This marketing delivered commercial success for “The Life of A Showgirl.” Upon its release, all 12 tracks filled the top 12 spots on the Billboard’s Hot 100. The album broke the record for first-week album sales. But, unfortunately, the music itself is mediocre.
Swift’s songs on this album are missing the combination of descriptive imagery, relatability, and catchy hooks that she has balanced perfectly in previous works.
In general, Swift’s new album is nothing new — the sounds are familiar, very similar to those on “Midnights,” and the lyrics, while less melancholy than her last album, contain the same heavy-handed attempts at metaphors and poeticism. For example, in the first track “The Fate of Ophelia,” Swift draws an extended metaphor comparing herself and the character Ophelia from William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” The general gist of the song seems to be that Ophelia, who went insane and committed suicide, was sad and so was Swift.
In contrast to her attempts at poeticism, some songs have clunky lines like “I’m not a bad b----/And this isn’t savage” and “I can make deals with the devil because my d---’s bigger.” Others lack self-awareness — Swift is a billionaire global pop star, perhaps she should not be pitying herself as “the girl who has everything and nothing at all” or “the first lamb to the slaughter.”
“The lyrics themselves just felt very performative, a little bit fake … (“The Life of a Showgirl”) didn’t really have the charming effect of the lyrics of her past music,” Berkeley High School junior Sophia Koshland said, “The vocabulary is getting too big. I think she got so much praise for her “folklore” album and those types of albums that now she’s putting too much emphasis on trying to make the lyrics tell a story when sometimes that just doesn’t work.”
There’s nothing that sticks in the mind of the listener from Swift’s twelfth album, no particularly memorable bridges or choruses. The songs are flat. Unlike hits such as Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” these songs don’t have momentum to propel them towards musical climaxes that Swift often nails with her famous bridges. Koshland said, “I just felt like the music got very generic and it didn’t feel very authentic or raw, which is kind of what I love about a lot of her past music.”
“I think that she’s attempting to appeal to younger audiences, but at least with her latest album … it felt more like they were appealing to maybe older audiences,” observed BHS junior Ishaan Ranchod. Some of these attempts involved Swift trying to utilize typically Gen Z phrases, such as “So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.”
Ashley Cunningham, an BHS English teacher, agreed that Swift’s most recent album may be failing to reach younger audiences. While Cunningham herself enjoyed the album, she admitted that may be because she is roughly the same age as Swift. She said, “I can see why a lot of people aren’t relating to (the album) … As someone who is 35, as a millennial woman in this world … I can see where she’s coming from.”
Swift has already deeply explored the hardships of fame and has clapped back at her critics in previous albums. By her twelfth studio album, the constant complaints about those critics and how difficult it is to be a celebrity stretch the limits of her listeners’ sympathy. How many average Swifties can relate to having friends “cloaked in Gucci and in scandal?” How many of them can truly “know the life of a showgirl?”
Cunningham said, “There’s definitely things I don’t relate to because I’m not like a successful self-made billionaire pop star who just went on this epic tour of the world and is setting all these like world records.”
One exception is “Ruin the Friendship” during which Swift describes a high school boy. She regrets never having explored her feelings for him before he died. In this song, Swift doesn’t sing much about her wealth or fame, she simply laments the loss of a good friend and wonders what might have been.The youthful tone calls back to earlier albums, as does the reference to Swift’s childhood best friend Abigail Anderson, who was also mentioned in Swift’s second album “Fearless” (Anderson apparently called Swift to relay the “bad news” of the friend’s passing).
“The Life of a Showgirl” is not a terrible album, it is just not anything special. Swift’s fans are constantly trying to dissect her songs to discover some profound depth in her music and many of Swift’s critics seem hell-bent on discovering every fault in each verse. Perhaps we just need to write off “The Life of a Showgirl” as mediocre, and hope that with her next album, Swift offers us something better. At one point in her career, Swift became famous because we were listening to her music. Now, we are listening to her music because she is famous.