October 6, 2025 - The rest of the time, Showgirl sounds like much of the pop music you have heard over the past 10 years and throughout your lifetime; it asks that this time, you listen more closely, because this is Taylor Swift, with the enormity of commercial power and cultural significance and algorithmic rank that implies.

October 9, 2025 - Josh: I just concluded my first listen to this album, and I can safely say that Taylor Swift has done it again! The Life of a Showgirl is continually entertaining and likable, and the production from Swedish music titans Max Martin and Shellback ...

October 3, 2025 - The songs are well turned, but in terms of genuinely memorable moments, Showgirl evinces just one killer chorus (Elizabeth Taylor), some impressively unexpected key changes on Wi$h Li$t and the authentically heart-tugging Ruin the Friendship, which finds Swift returning to her home town for the funeral of a high school boy she regrets not dating.

October 10, 2025 - Swift has been pop’s alpha figure ... precisely a goodbye to all that, but it does cast a wary eye on her past while greeting her future with a glee that verges on the unbridled....

October 3, 2025 - Swift has long been an expert at gripping, conversation-starting album concepts, but The Life of a Showgirl repeats a Midnights mistake: the starter idea is intriguing, the visuals introduce a new aesthetic, but the actual music doesn’t match the big ideas. The “look behind the curtain” doesn’t really tell us anything new about Swift behind the stage presence and glittering lights, nothing that we didn’t get already from songs like “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” and “mirrorball.” “Elizabeth Taylor” veers into stale Taylor Swift song cosplay, covering material she wrote more elegantly on a song like Red’s “The Lucky One.”

October 10, 2025 - Critics, in turn, churned out generally favorable reviews that tiptoed on heelless blistered feet around the album’s less glittering moments, at least aware that they brought this on themselves. Mikael Wood praised Showgirl’s hooks for The Los Angeles Times, but admitted its failure to reach the “psychological portraiture” that Poets laid bare. Ann Powers dubbed Taylor “Western pop’s definitive presence” and an undimmable star for NPR but confessed the album’s flirtation with innuendo is “sometimes awkward.” Alexis Petridis threw in his two cents on a two star review for The Guardian, asking the quiet question in print when wondering if Showgirl’s “distinct lack of undeniable hooks and nailed-on melodies” is due to a rush job.

October 8, 2025 - A surprisingly immature album from Taylor at this point in her life and career.

October 3, 2025 - Taylor Swift's 'The Life of a Showgirl' combines new, exciting sonic turns with incisive storytelling.

October 5, 2025 - Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, her fifth this decade, is the year’s most disappointing blockbuster pop record. It is disappointing in a way that sparks frustration beyond the apathy that I felt after hearing Midnights, beyond the dejectedness I felt after hearing The Tortured Poets Department. That album’s worst offense was being boring, but The Life of a Showgirl enters the territory of being offensive at its worst moments.

October 6, 2025 - Over a wide-screen sound, we hear about the allure of the spotlight, the detachment required to live the public life (“Do you want to skate on the ice inside my veins?”), and then we wait for the part that pulls the whole thing together, but the song, which is otherwise solid enough, just ... ends. There’s a real story of transformation in the songs of Showgirl, and this seems like the place where Swift could explain how the too-cautious daughter afraid of risk became the business powerhouse who fought off her fears of heartbreak and finally accepted love, and maybe how art and performance and experience helped her.

.... Taylor Swift can capture the zeitgeist because she understands the concept of one: a battle between tension and freedom, and the knowledge that conflict is necessary to sustain the things we want. ... The Life of a Showgirl might be one of her most uneven records, but she’s as compelling as she’s ever been – the showgirl, the ringmaster and the circus all in one.

October 3, 2025 - But the album seriously kicks into gear with its third number, “Opalite,” a song that starts modestly and then surprises you with a sheer pheromone rush of a chorus. From that slow-burning head-rush forward, “The Life of a Showgirl” never lets up, in the quality of its subtle but completely engaging pop arrangements or in Swift’s audacity in giving every lyric a high-concept variation on a theme.

October 6, 2025 - Swift’s 12th original studio album, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’, appears anything but modest. She opens it on ‘The Fate of Ophelia’, a love story that sweeps her off her feet – not towards a fairytale ending, but away from Shakespearean ...

October 25, 2025 - There but for the grace of Travis Kelce, apparently, goes Taylor Swift. She sings that she didn't go out like Ophelia because you saved her, and that's why she's ready to "pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes." If you haven't yet made your peace with that kind of writerly excess, then "The Fate Of Ophelia" won't convince you. Neither will anything else on The Life Of A Showgirl.

October 3, 2025 - ... What’s good on “Showgirl”? “Opalite” is a gorgeous soft-rock tune about overcoming old instincts — “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past / My brother used to call it ‘eating out of the trash’” — while “Ruin the ...

“The Life of a Showgirl” is not a bad album, it is just not at the level fans have come to expect of Swift. For once, the strongest part of the album is not Swift’s writing but rather the production of Martin and Shellback.

… The lyrics feel like an attempt to remain modern and relevant, to echo the fun and witty lyrics of superstar Sabrina Carpenter, especially when listening to ‘Wood’. But to be honest, Taylor does not need to do this – she has a die-hard, loyal fanbase who adore her music and are seemingly surprised by the unusual lack of poetics from the previous ‘tortured poet’ (persona) herself. The thing is: I won’t stop wearing my cardigans, listening to evermore on every rainy day or playing Fearless in my car on my way to uni. However, I doubt that I will listening to ‘The Life of a Showgirl’, especially as a whole, very often.