Taylor Swift has a powerful, emotional vow to all her body critics: “I Don’t Care Anymore.” See the intimate moment and how Travis Kelce’s love changed everything… Full story here

“Showgirl” hits the airwaves mere weeks after Swift’s engagement to NFL star Travis Kelce, whom she began dating in 2023, and one year after Swift’s commercially successful yet critically polarizing 2024 album, “The Tortured Poets Department.”

This time around, Swift took feedback on board. She opted not to work with her recent go-to producers, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, reuniting instead with pop powerhouses Max Martin and Karl “Shellback” Schuster, who helped create some of her biggest pre-2020 hits, including “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” and “Delicate.”

All 12 songs on “Showgirl” are cowritten and co-produced by Swift, Martin, and Shellback. During her appearance on Kelce’s podcast, “New Heights,” Swift said it felt like an equal team-up for the first time.

“It felt like all three of us in the room were carrying the same weight as creators,” she said. “We’ve been waiting years to come back together and make this project.”

Swift also said her main goals for the album were twofold: “Melodies that were so infectious that you’re almost angry at it, and lyrics that are just as vivid, but crisp and focused and completely intentional.”

“Showgirl” was written and produced in Sweden last year, during Swift’s downtime on the Eras Tour. In contrast to “Poets,” which is dominated by breakup songs, manic spirals, and existential crises, “Showgirl” is an upbeat pop album that Swift said reflects the happier shift in her life behind the curtain.

“It just comes from the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life,” she explained. “That effervescence has come through on this record.”

Business Insider’s senior pop culture writer and resident Swift expert, Callie Ahlgrim, reviewed each track upon first listen. (Skip to the end to see the only songs worth listening to and the album’s final score.)

Fans love to tease Swift for being a horrible judge of lead singles, especially for her pop albums. Despite each song’s success, “Shake It Off,” “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Anti-Hero,” and “Fortnight” are among the weakest tracks on their respective albums. (We don’t even talk about “Me!” anymore.)”The Fate of Ophelia” is indisputably the best of the bunch — a rare song that’s worthy of the radio push, music video, and everything else that comes with a lead single treatment.Much like Swift’s first crossover hit, “Love Story,” Swift audaciously rewrites a Shakespearean tragedy, absorbing its characters into her own lore. Ophelia famously meets her watery death in “Hamlet” after she loses the ability to communicate; in the final moments of her life, she’s misunderstood and pitied by everyone around her. Swift herself feared she might suffer that very fate, singing in the first verse, “If you’d never called for me / I might’ve drowned in melancholy.”This is not only a reference to Ophelia’s final scene, but also to Swift’s previous relationship. “You don’t really read into my melancholia,” she sings in the 2022 single “Lavender Haze.” Years earlier, in the 2017 track “Gorgeous,” she gazed into her lover’s blue eyes and prophesied that she might “sink and drown and die.”But in “The Fate of Ophelia,” the heroine is able to change the prophecy. The title of Swift’s version belies her romantic triumph.