Taylor Swift, Lover review: The sound of an artist excited to be earnest again

It’s been two years now since Taylor Swift announced her own death. Reputation, the singer-songwriter’s excellent sixth album, was camp and melodramatic, killing off “the old Taylor” and waging war on anyone and everyone who dared to criticise her. It was sincerity veiled as self-parody, insecurity veiled as breeziness – and all the better for that uneasy paradox. But Lover, her new, seventh album, feels like a partial resurrection of the Swift of old: moony romance and earnest earworms abound.

Swift has a habit of putting her worst foot forward. The album’s lead single, “Me!”, is peppy and poppy in all the wrong ways, a rictus grin of a song that rings hollow. Thank goodness that the rest of the album is nothing like that. Perky opening track “Forgot That You Existed” is a syncopated snigger, on which Swift shrugs off old grudges and breathes a sigh of relief in doing so. “Something magical happened one night,” she sings. “I forgot that you existed. And I thought that it would kill me, but it didn’t.” The title track, meanwhile, is poignant and unfussy, a reminder of Swift’s ability to distil infatuation into something specific and universal.

In a lengthy introduction to the album, Swift wrote that the album is a “love letter to love”. It’s a delightfully vague sentiment, and one that is only partly accurate – elsewhere, the virulence resurfaces. “The Man” – which owes a musical debt to emo-pop trio MUNA – is an excoriating takedown of society’s double standards. “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man,” she sings over flashy harmonies and murky synths. It’s the most openly feminist statement she’s made, and one of the album’s standout tracks. If she was a man, she declares, “I’d be just like Leo in St Tropez” – a reference, presumably, to Leonardo DiCaprio’s conveyor belt of young model girlfriends. Swift’s own dating life has been often mocked: even Tina Fey facetiously warned her to “stay away from Michael J Fox’s son” a few years ago. Double standards, see?

Swift has been in a relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn for over two years, and “London Boy” is a beautifully nerdy ode to his home country. It will probably be mocked, but it is pure joy. “I enjoy walking Camden Market in the afternoon,” Swift sings, before name-checking Highgate, Hampstead Heath, Brixton, Shoreditch, Hackney, Bond Street and the West End – she is nothing if not thorough – and referencing uni, pubs, rugby and high tea. You can already hear the hordes of British fans screaming along to the line, “They say home is where the heart is, but God I love the English”.

“Soon You’ll Get Better” follows, and offers an abrupt change in tone. A tribute to Swift’s mother, whose cancer returned earlier this year, it is the most stripped back track on the album. The Dixie Chicks, apparently one of her mother’s favourite bands, offer backing instrumentals, as Swift admits to her own delusions atop country-inflected slide guitars: “Desperate people find faith / So I pray to Jesus too.”

“The Archer” is a whisper away from being a good song – it builds and builds without taking flight, like a plane stuck forever taxiing – but “I Think He Knows” is excellent, its slinky bass channelling the funk of Prince, more 1999 than 1989. On the old-school “Paper Rings”, the vocals are muffled and tinny – like when you’d record your favourite song off the radio and listen on repeat.

At around track 14, Lover starts to feel baggy. There is a brilliant album among the 18 songs, if only it had been pruned a little. But Swift has never been one to hold back, and it’s hard to resent her for it. This is the sound of a singer excited to be earnest again. Taylor Swift is dead. Long live Taylor Swift.