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 10, 2025 - 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 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 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 7, 2025 - Swift makes no bones about the fact that her happy ending has come after a lot of regrets, missed opportunities and heartache, and that, while she’s achieved previously unknown heights as a global pop superstar, her time in the spotlight has not been perfect. Yet she uses The Life of a Showgirl to showcase the different sides of her personality, perhaps more wholly than any previous album.

October 21, 2025 - All the best parts of the album look back in some way, but they do not sound like one another: there’s bubblegum pop; 1970s soul; neo-disco; a drumless, indie-guitar diss apparently addressed to Charli xcx, who seems to have sided with Taylor’s tortured-poet ex; that piano ballad; and more. The eclecticism implies that no single style can fit all that experience (all those eras, as it were). It also suggests that her new life will not, artistically, tie her down. does devoted monogamy foreclose the life of a showgirl? Can a celebrity as shiny as Swift avoid the marital fate of Elizabeth Taylor, who exchanged rings eight times (twice with the same man)?

October 4, 2025 - Yes, I understand it’s a nod to Ophelia and fits the “showgirl” concept, but the font actually drives me crazy to look at. It feels lazy and distractingly bad. The image itself is attention-grabbing and different for Swift, and I think ...

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.

Only eight months after the end of the ridiculously successful ‘The Eras Tour’, Taylor Swift has released her latest album, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ – and here may be where the first problem lies for me. Part of the fun of Taylor’s music is often the build-up: the suspense, excitement to be immersed in a whole new style and aesthetic.

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

October 3, 2025 - Business Insider: “The Life of a Showgirl has some of her best songs in years — and some of her cringiest … I certainly admire and applaud Swift for going full throttle and committing to her vision. Showgirl is the most brazenly pop-forward, melodically savvy, and structurally polished album that Swift has released in about a decade ...

August 8, 2025 - I think at some point the reactions to the album have become less about the music but more about the listeners feelings towards Taylor Swift herself. ... Uh because she set people's expectation when saying ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ is all about infectious pop melodies without losing the quality story-telling of ‘folklore.’

October 5, 2025 - Rather than tying Showgirl up with a bow, it’s more likely to prompt a revisit of other, better Swift duets from the last half-decade, like those with HAIM and Phoebe Bridgers, or the juicy pop fare of Carpenter herself. Everything else lands somewhere in the middle. Opener “The Life of Ophelia” is a starry showtune in search of a “Hamlet” musical (not derogatory).

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

Despite a greater variance in beat drops and textural flourishes, the middling mid-tempo The Life of a Showgirl strays even further from the magic Swift's pen once wielded. ... An album littered with so many been-there stunts and basic melodies ...

Sonically, “Elizabeth Taylor” is reminiscent of tracks from “reputation,” moving between piano instrumentals and a booming backing track. The lyric “You’re only as hot as your last hit baby” certainly sums up the showgirl theme ...