“Bangers.” That’s the word Taylor Swift used to describe all 12 songs on her twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, and the world knew what that meant. Swift’s last album, 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, may have scored the superstar’s biggest opening-week debut and ruled the charts for months on end, but the sprawling, relatively mournful project was a departure from the immaculately constructed pop anthems that had defined her career (give or take a Folk-more) for a decade.

When Swift announced that its follow-up was created in Sweden during the Eras Tour with pop geniuses Max Martin and Shellback — who helped create some of Swift’s most enduring pop smashes from the mid-2010s, and who hadn’t worked with her in eight years — the expectation of wall-to-wall bangers that Swif

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