Taylor Swift - Cardigan but every word is a Google Image

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Taylor Swift - Cardigan.

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Taylor Swift’s surprise eighth album Folklore makes a shimmering debut atop the Rolling Stone Top 200 Albums Chart this week with 852,700 units, surpassing Juice WRLD’s Legends Never Die for the biggest first week of any album so far in 2020 by over 300,000 units.

The album, which was largely produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner, saw over 627,000 album sales and nearly 260 million on-demand audio streams during the week of July 24th through July 30th. The album also saw over 86,000 song sales, which was aided by the sale of physical singles of “Cardigan” on her website. (Relatedly, a knit cardigan was also available for purchase along with a digital download of the album.)

While Folklore didn’t surpass the 991,800 first-week units of Lover — largely because Folklore didn’t come with partnerships with the likes of Target and Amazon — it did out-stream it by nearly 50 million on-demand audio streams.

The song that catapulted Taylor Swift from too-cool-for-country phenom to the-world-is-not-enough pop supernova was “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” the debut single from her fourth album, “Red,” in 2012. The first of her songs to top the Billboard Hot 100, it deployed country references as a tease on the way to an ecstatically saccharine, unmistakably pop hook — a universal anthem of I’m over it.

Now, eight years later, Swift has made, well, one of those records herself, or at least something like it. “Folklore,” her alternately soothing and soppy, pensive and suffocating eighth album, is a definitive jolt away from the last near decade of Swift’s high-gloss, style-fluid, emotionally astute big-tent pop.

Made from scratch in the quarantine era, “Folklore” was recorded at her home in Los Angeles, and written and produced in remote collaboration largely with Aaron Dessner (from the National) and her go-to emotional extractor, Jack Antonoff.

Swift’s “Folklore” features collaborations with the National’s Aaron Dessner as well as Jack Antonoff.
Choosing this approach may be purely a function of circumstance, but Swift has been due for a rebaptism for some time now. “Folklore” marks a conclusion (temporary or not, it’s unclear) to her long march into the teeth of contemporary mega-pop, which over the course of four albums — “Red,” “1989,” “Reputation” and “Lover” — has paid decreasing dividends, musical and social.

“Folklore” is the first attempt at a post-pop Swift, and it is many things that Swift albums generally are not: rough-edged, downtrodden, spacey.

More intriguing are the tracks where the experimentation with tonal approach succeeds. “Seven” opens with an ethereally lustrous vocal, with Swift sighing her lyrics, landing the rhymes in unexpected places. On “Illicit Affairs,” she whispers her words like long-resented secrets — “Tell your friends you’re out for a run/ You’ll be flushed when you return” — sprinkled with sunburst syllables designed to freeze perpetrators in their tracks.

And then there’s “Exile,” the most atypical song on the album. A lovely, anguished duet with Justin Vernon (credited as Bon Iver), it’s a stark and unsettling back and forth of recriminations. Swift telegraphs distance and skepticism: “I can see you staring, honey/Like he’s just your understudy/Like you’d get your knuckles bloody for me.”

Far more often, though, the production dictates Swift’s boundaries. The smoky “Cardigan” has a number of moving parts, distracting from Swift’s breathy, undersung vocals. The hymnal “Epiphany” feels claustrophobic — Enya-like without the flutter. “Mirrorball” verges on shoegaze, and “Mad Woman” has the blend of morose and wry that’s a Lana Del Rey trademark.

That’s just one of her retreats here. “Folklore” is also a full retreat to whiteness after dalliances with Black music on “Reputation.” (It is also, maybe, as close to a backdoor country album as Swift is likely to venture — see the harmonica and pedal steel on “Betty.”) And given its overall dourness, it is a retreat from conventional pop language, which is to say, it may well be a retreat from radio. Not that that much matters for Swift, who has spent more than a decade earning her fans, and may well be approaching the Beyoncé stage of her career, where cultural authority isn’t dependent on steady hitmaking. That’s the new nature of pop superstardom anyhow — mass-scale cult figures superserving their most ardent followers by the millions.

The desolate, stubborn, overcomposed indie rock of “Folklore,” though, is a tough thicket to tame. Sometimes she triumphs, wrestling it until it’s slack. But when it stifles her, it deserves all the eye rolls it gets.