Taylor Swift’s new album is about a reckless kind of freedom

As The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) finally sees its official release, the intention behind the title remains as enigmatic as it was when Taylor Swift announced it two months ago.

The title track seems to mock one such tortured poet who carts a typewriter around and likens the budding couple to Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas. “We’re modern idiots,” Swift laughs. The album’s aesthetic wallows in anguish and Swift’s liner notes and social media captions are littered with self-consciously poetic proclamations. And the erratic period captured in the lyrics couldn’t be further from a life of cloistered studiousness.

Perhaps inevitably, she got burned, causing wounds that are now healed: “And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted,” she wrote in a new Instagram caption, with a primness that belies the unbridled hunger behind the album’s lyrics.