A Year After The Tortured Poets Department, It’s Clear Everyone Judged Taylor Swift’s Most Important Album Too Soon

As ‘TTPD’ celebrates its one-year anniversary on April 19, 2025, look back at Swift’s 11th record with fresh eyes

Here is where we were one year ago with Taylor Swift.

She had just become the only artist to win album of the year at the Grammys four times. A few months prior, she had released re-recorded versions of 2010’s Speak Now and 2014’s 1989 in her continued effort to reclaim work from her original masters. All the while, she was in the midst of the highest-grossing tour of all time, a two-year trek through stadiums across five continents.

During it all, she fell in love again, and her private life turned into a bigger public spectacle than ever, with everyone wondering what she and her Super Bowl champion boyfriend would do next. Whether you listened to her or not, adored her or didn’t care for her, Taylor Swift — the performer, the artist, the individual — was inescapable.

On April 19, 2024, “Taylormania” reached its fever pitch when the singer-songwriter dropped her fifth original album in five years, The Tortured Poets Department, and its accompanying Anthology. Altogether, it’s a sprawling 31-track exploration of Swift’s romantic trials and tribulations, her fraught relationship with her very public existence and the complicated balance between fame, love and art.

Compared to its predecessors Midnights, Evermore and Folklore, The Tortured Poets Department received a more tepid response from listeners. Because when a supernova like Swift releases music, the immediate conversation about the project’s merit often centers on the artist versus the art itself. The argument that Taylor Swift was “too big to fail” became an easy way to dismiss rave reviews as pandering fluff — or scathing criticism as an attempt to knock her down a few pegs.

The only way to break through the noise of knee-jerk reactions is to spend time with the songs. After one year with The Tortured Poets Department, it’s clear that the album will be looked back upon as a valuable time capsule of a star at an unprecedented level of fame. Not simply because the LP bears Swift’s name, but because the songwriting pulls the curtain back on her most intrusive thoughts.

“I’ll tell you something right now/I’d rather burn my whole life down/Than listen to one more second of all this bitchin’ and moanin’,” she sings on “But Daddy I Love Him,” a defiant message to overzealous fans lamenting the decisions she makes in her personal life.

In the song “Clara Bow,” Swift gets self-referential in a way only she could, closing the track with a sharp look at the music industry and the star-making machine, imagining a cynical record executive saying, “You look like Taylor Swift/In this light, we’re loving it/You’ve got edge she never did.”

As she grapples with the pressures of superstardom, Swift experiences a heartbreak that she writes about in exhaustive detail and wild desperation, from her ex’s “Jehovah’s Witness suit” in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” to his detrimental drug addiction in “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus.”

In the grand scheme of Swift’s career, The Tortured Poets Department will go down as a striking and unique body of work, produced by a one-of-a-kind pop star amid a total upheaval in every aspect of her life.

This isn’t to say Swift is the only person to grieve a devastating situationship, to worry about her staying power in the spotlight or to have their fame fundamentally affect their entire life. But she might be the only one capable of pulling these themes together in tandem.

The Tortured Poets Department is her warning signals, her diary of unbridled emotion and her manifesto about her legacy wrapped into one, and she isn’t asking for pity. She just wants you to listen.