Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets Department': 5 of the Most Brutal Reviews

If you have been living under a rock, you may have missed that Taylor Swift's 11th studio album, The Tortured Poet's Department, dropped last week, catapulting the pop star back to the top of the charts where she, as of Monday afternoon, claimed all 10 of the top spots on both Apple Music and Spotify's most-streamed songs.

While the latest record, 16 tracks plus a companion LP featuring 15 more that was dropped as a surprise, has received a large number of positive reviews, not all of the criticism has been glowing.

Of course, no one artist can or should be expected to placate everyone, and Swift's massive popularity speaks for itself. Some of the less positive reviews have noted that Swift has set the bar for her own work so high that it would be simply impossible to clear it time and time again.

Here are some of the harshest early critiques of Tortured Poets.

'Could use an editor'

Lindsay Zoladz, writing for the New York Times, began her review by praising both the album's title track and its opener, a duet with the rapper Post Malone, as "potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance."

But Zoladz goes on to criticize the full body of work as "unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose," suggesting the album was bloated and not among the star's best.

"Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit," Zoladz concludes her review.

'A little tortured'

Over at Pitchfork, the music publication known for its withering reviews, Olivia Horn gave Tortured Poets a middling 6.6 rating out of 10, writing that it's "unruly, unedited, and even a little tortured."

Echoing the Times' criticism, Horn focuses on Swift's songwriting as "at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, conspicuously wanting for an editor," while also defending the length and size of the album (31 tracks in all, clocking in at more than two hours) as a "concession to the modern music economy" in which streamers incentivize artists to "batch as many songs as possible, in as many packages as possible."

'A rare misstep'

At the British music site NME, Laura Molloy writes that Tortured Poets is "surprisingly flat, and at times, cringeworthy." The critic, like Horn in Pitchfork, takes issue with Swift's songwriting.

Molloy writes that the title track's lyrics—which includes a line about how the songwriter Charlie Puth should be more famous—are "the worst on the record." (Notably, the Times review highlighted that same lyric as "strangely humanizing.") Despite those critiques, Molloy gave the album a respectable three out of five stars.

'Quality-control issues'

Writing for The Atlantic, critic Spencer Kornhaber calls Tortured Poets "okay," with the qualification that "Taylor Swift is not someone you're supposed to feel okay about."

Kornhaber, like others, faults the size and sprawl of the work: "Much of the album is a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic."

'Strikes out looking'

Perhaps the most brutal review came courtesy of Paste Magazine, which panned Tortured Poets as an example of an artist putting out an album "because I can," not "because I should."

The review, which was published without the customary byline due to "threats of violence" that were lodged against a critic who reviewed a prior Swift album, slammed the songwriting efforts—once again taking issue with the title track as "some of Swift's worst lyricism to-date."

Despite those knocks, Tortured Poets also received a wide array of rave reviews.

Rolling Stone deemed it an "instant classic," while British papers The Independent and The Times called it "irresistible" and a "five-star pleasure," respectively.

And the numbers don't lie: Spotify announced on Friday that the album was the first ever in the platform's history to garner more than 300 million streams in a single day, breaking previous records also held by Swift.