2020 ended on a good note it seems like. After releasing her album, Folklore, earlier this year, Taylor Swift surprised fans by announcing and releasing her brand new album, Evermore.
The new album comes as a pleasant surprise to Swifties after a stressful year, fans of Swift were very happy to hear the news.
The new album is her continuation of her “goth-folk” era since releasing Folklore, something new for Swift and she pulls it off amazingly. She is very poetic when she writes music for this genre. Evermore may be its own album, but it’s also very much an extension of Folklore – a “sister record,” as Swift calls it. And what better way to give such a songwriting-heavy project a second life? In lieu of the endless coordinated music videos, live shows and photoshoots that have tied each of her last five or so albums under one giant aesthetic umbrella, Swift has doubled down on Folklore’s themes of storytelling and contemporary mythology by, well, writing more songs.
With Evermore coasting on its older sibling’s tidal wave of success, Swift and her team had even more freedom to do whatever they wanted, and it reflects back in the music. She’s working here again with Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and although Folklore’s moody, “indie”-inspired sound is still the dominant feature of Evermore, there’s room for more variety and experimentation this time around. The wicked country murder ballad “No Body, No Crime,” guest-starring Este and Danielle Haim, rubs elbows with the twinkling chamber-pop track “Gold Rush.” Swift warmly sings against honky-tonk piano in “Dorothea” and then, in the complete opposite direction, artificially distorts her voice on the seething “Closure,” using Bon Iver’s Messina vocal modifier to turn her soft timbre into a barely-contained robotic growl. It’s a refreshing change of pace: Swift’s usual approach to dabbling in new genres or sounds is to go balls-to-the-wall, but on Evermore, she’s just as good at curating these more detailed production flourishes, all with the same contouring and meticulousness as she does with her best lyrics.
Folklore was more downbeat, had a more smoky bonfire tone to it, where as Evermore just deepens the themes of the previous album – love gone sour, self-actualization gone wrong, friendships gone, just gone. The whole album has a wisdom that is personal, without leaning into fake aphorism. It’s a perfect December album, similar to Swift’s past song “Safe & Sound” in a way, except here Swift is more mature and grown up.
Stream Evermore now!