From Taylor Swift to Midnights, we've ranked all of the singer's studio albums from best to worst. She's since genre-jumped from country to proper pop, to electro R&B and bare-backed folk. The difficulty (and, perhaps, the beauty) of attempting to order her albums is that 1) she's been so consistently good, and 2) whichever albums harbor your affections most can change by the year, month, day, and even hour depending on your headspace and heartache. and Bleachers fame), who employs an undercurrent of drums that boom like palms on metal doors and vocals that echo as if off skyscrapers. The bridge to Fifteen includes a great, revealing line about a friends lost innocence (And Abigail gave everything/She had to a boy/Who changed his mind/And we both cried), while the playful melody of Hey Stephen captures the essence of what makes for indelible teen-pop. Then there are the hopeful messages embedded in the minor-keys of "marjorie," an homage to her opera-singing grandmother, and "happiness," the chorus of which captures the album's essence best of all: "There'll be happiness after me / But there was happiness because of me.". Taylor Swift's 10 seminal albums, ranked In honor of her instant-classic, record-breaking new LP Midnights , here's EW's ranking of Taylor Swift's 10 studio albums from her illustrious career. 'Red' is filled with top notch tunes: the brilliantly snarky 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together' (Swift's first ever Billboard 100 Number One) and fizzing '22' are stone-cold smashers. As Rob Sheffield wrote for Rolling Stone, this album combined a lot of previous versions of Swift, seemingly capping off her career. Songs like Love Story, You Belong with Me and Fifteen, filled with heart-on-sleeve lyrics and earworm hooks, remain among her best. In the 16 years since the single Tim McGraw launched Swift to country stardom, shes jettisoned the genres ill-fitting signifiers and overcome the limitations of her early recordingsimprovements captured in her Taylors Version re-recordings as a powerful statement of artistic agency. Drag and drop items from the bottom and put them on your desired tier. 2023 Oscars predictions: See who will win at the 95th Academy Awards. Your email address will not be published. Ten albums, a mantelpiece of awards and over a decade later, Swift has become one of the biggest popstars on the planet. Perfectly Fine." The title track, whose lilting rhythm and reverb-soaked drums and vocals are reminiscent of Mazzy Stars 90s gem Fade Into You, and the acoustic Soon Youll Get Better, a tribute to Swifts mother, hark back to the singers pre-pop days, while I Think He Knows and False God evoke Carly Rae Jepsens brand of 80s R&B-inflected electro-pop. I Knew You Were Trouble, with its swift-step breakdown, saw her signature sound infused with trendy dance production. What follows is a collection of stone-cold glimpses into the ripple effect discontentment has on relationships: the sadness of a seasonal lover, affection and effort met with indifference, infidelity ending in death. On her first three albums, love is mostly a daydream. If nothing else, the album proves shes unwilling to operate on anyones terms other than her own. Swifts surprise eighth album arrived with very little fanfare. that have almost childish lyrics to soft, heart-wrenching ballads about love and loss like "Soon You'll Get Better.". When "Midnights" was first announced, Swift described it as "the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life" and invited fans to meet her at midnight the night the album dropped. Her self-titled debut stood as her lone and tall titan at the time of its 2006 release, which was immediately met with commercial and critical success, catapulting a then-16-year-old Swift to stardom almost overnight. "Fearless" outranks "Taylor Swift" as it has more standout songs and has a cohesive sound that distinctly country-pop. 1989 signifies a rebirth of sorts for Taylor, not just because it's named after her actual birth year, but more due to its status as her first seismic genre shift. Filled with rootin tootin tunes like Tim McGraw, Our Song and Teardrops on My Guitar (largely considered Swifts breakout song) that stormed the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, it earned a teenage Taylor support slots on tour with Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts and Faith Hill. Not content with just giving us one surprise album in 2020, Swift returned to her cabin in the woods and a mere five months later released Evermore. And though "All Too Well" is of course her opus in this arena, Speak Now precedes it with an impressive display of her one-off storytelling powers. "Picture To Burn" is a scorned teen's "Before He Cheats" swapping shooting whiskey for rumor mills with a grown woman's wit and a veteran songwriter's aptitude. There were TikTok teasers to reveal the track titles, but beyond that fans weren't given many clues about what to expect from the album. These tales spin out like spools of fine gold, delicate in their delivery, eschewing catchy hooks to instead relish in simplicity. There are, of course, a handful of golden tunes (Dancing with Our Hands Tied, Call It What You Want, Delicate). Where her debut guaranteed she was, at the very least, a momentary sensation, it wasn't until 2008's Fearless that the world understood the musical force that Taylor Swift could be. Some songs lean more country ("Mean") whereas others hint at the musical experimentation that would follow in subsequent albums ("Enchanted," "Haunted"), and, yet, the album is a mix of styles that seamlessly blend together. The worlds defining voice in music and pop culture: breaking whats new and whats next since 1952. First released in 2008, its original release won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and thirteen years later in 2021, Fearless (Taylors Version) became the first of Swifts re-recorded albums to drop. this is everything before Red (Taylor's Version) it took so l. Overall, it's charming and mostly tame, but then again, she's happy. Her door to escapism opened for lonesome, fractured listeners everywhere, who dove headfirst into the cottagecore sound grove, and relished in Swift's unexpected pivot towards barer-boned, folk-styled songwriting with electro-adjacent undertones whispered throughout. At just 20-years-old before she had even fully blossomed out of country's genre barriers Taylor had mastered the delicate balance of detailing the life moments blurred between adolescence and adulthood. 20: 20. The catalyst was lead single "Tim McGraw," but this ticket to the country radio airwaves turned out to be a red herring with the advent of other ironclad, infinitely repeatable songs that remain fan favorites, even in lieu of our now excess of options. This Taylor Swift discography is ranked from best to worst, so the top Taylor Swift albums can be found at the top of the list. Taylor Swift's folklore rose from quiet shadows at the peak of isolation and uncertainty, written and produced in quarantine and released during the first COVID summer. She's endlessly accessible, easy to understand even in her later, more cryptic works, yet her songwriting is also a blank space (*cue pen-click*) ripe for filling in your personal memories and private associations. But folklore is more a shuffled series of vignettes than a throughlined story, planting the lyrics with easter eggs recurring motifs (a favorite cardigan), places (cobblestone paths), and events (pulling up in a car, professing love on the porch) to offer conflicting perspectives of a love long ago lost. We, the listeners, need a few more of our own sleepless nights, staying up drinking with Taylor and looking backward to definitively weigh our affection. How does Midnights compare to its worthy predecessors? She also adds that with her recent re-recording of previous albums, Swift has "unlocked something brilliant and fresh in her songwriting," by dipping her toe back into previous eras. 1989 instead is sonically joyous without losing dimension or leaning on familiarity. I'm not using the 5-tier-ranking-scale or whatever because if I did literally half of the list would be a 5/5 yeah music is pretty good rn. Would it be soft and sincere, like "New Year's Day," poppy and upbeat like "Wildest Dreams," or go back to Swift's acoustic roots with songs like "Untouchable"? Plus her later albums feature songs that are more interesting and creative lyrically and stylistically. The Definitive Ranking of Every Song on Taylor Swift's 1989 Grammy winner's fifth studio album is officially out today, and we cannot stop listening to these top five songs By Jenna Mullins. Rosen is right this album combines intimate lyrics and incredibly catchy tunes and it is showcased in Swift's hit single "You Belong With Me," an upbeat anthem for those dealing with unrequited love. But as Pitchfork critic Anna Gaca pointed out, the album may be honest and genuine, but it feels uneven with how much it sways from garish pop singles like "ME!" But over a decade later, Taylor makes the incredible move of re-recording her teenaged relics almost note-for-note, now at 31 years old. Look, Reputation served a purpose. Sal Cinquemani, Midnights is far removed from the folk instrumentation of Folklore and Evermore, coming closest to mirroring 1989s more uptempo electro-pop palette. Returning to this record then, with its new polish and poise, is a kind of homecoming celebration. It's the stuff of shared languages, not unlike our own pensive journal entries when we had nowhere else to turn but the page. So reads Taylor Swift's social media announcement that, just two months after gracing fans with her re-recording of Fearless, she was giving the same treatment to 2012's Red with all 30 songs originally intended for the record. But none are more affecting than "champagne problems," a first-person post-mortem after rejecting a marriage proposal a classic "it's not you, it's me" scenario with simple piano chords accompanying the guilt of walking away and the peril of being mentally unwell ("'She would've made such a lovely bride' / 'What a shame she's fked in the head,' they said"). Periodically, Midnights does run into issues of redundancy, which has more to do with Jack Antonoffs deficiencies as a producer than with Swifts skills as a writer and performer. All of Taylor Swift's Albums in order + Some unreleased, bonus, and soundtrack songs (only ones that are in a mostly complete state) in table form A mean/mode score calculator under each album Page 2 A macro-enabled automatic ranking table of each album's mean score, with colours that re-orders automatically as you score the songs on Page 1 Page 3 It's the album that immortalized her in the cultural ethos (for the first time around), delivering instant classics in "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me" that are forever fan favorites no matter how far her style and sensibilities have evolved. The album feels incredibly personal to Swift, as the songs are odes to important parts of her life, from her current boyfriend to New York City. As if the gift of folklore's acoustic stylings wasn't a treat enough, Taylor conceived a surprise sister album like clockwork during her end-of-year creative storm, amidst filming the Long Pond Studio Sessions documentary and re-recording Fearless. Midnights is simultaneously a rare treat and a return to normalcy. These were the de facto anthems for young listeners especially, clutching MP3 players to the chest like rosaries as we projected onto Taylor's portraits of then-mythical teen love. This time, she trades her upbeat synth-pop for overt trap tremors and heavy-handed hip-hop, like harsh emergency strobes disrupting a blacked-out cityscape. The album plays as a survey course in contemporary pop, and Swift is game to try just about anything, from the uninhibited dance-pop of standout Starlight to the thundering heartland rock of Holy Ground. The tracks that work best are those on which the production is creative and modern in ways that are in service to Swifts songwriting. Theres a Bon Iver collaboration, too: melancholy duet Exile, a slow-burning number which eventually erupts into chattering layered vocals and euphoric strings at the climax. This only further proves that "Reputation" is a prime example that Swift can experiment with a variety of genres and still create magic. Released in 2012, "Red" is a clear departure from Swift's country days, though she holds onto her signatures, like tragic tales told with beautiful lyrics and upbeat, catchy hits, pivoting easily between the two. Overall, the beauty of revisiting Red is that many of us, at points high and low, have related to its caustic, dizzying array of emotion, tracing the nonlinear trajectory of falling in love, breaking your heart, and putting it back together again. His contributions here are uniformly clean and efficient, but plenty of his signature production tics, even if theyre presented here in a fresh context, are beginning to feel overused. Editors Note: This article was originally published on July 6, 2021. Debut. From the first track, you know this album isn't like what you've been hearing on the radio it opens with the synthetic beats and sounds of "Welcome to New York.". Here Taylor sacked off her country roots and embraced full-blown pop. 1989 is a masterclass in how to make a timeless pop record. Standout songs on the album include "The 1," which sets the tone of the album; "The Last Great American Dynasty," a folk song-esque storytelling in Swift's signature style; and "Exile," two perspectives on a broken love story (the lyric video shows off the mirroring narratives well). Standouts tracks on this album also include "Fearless," an easy listen that captures the sweet feelings surrounding new romances; "Fifteen," a young love story that unfolds over several verses; "White Horse," a slow tune featuring lyrics about heartbreak that cut deep; "Love Story," a romantic tale with a fairytale edge; and "The Best Day," an emotional song that is filled with sweet childhood memories. These are songs that beckon celebration, hands raised over heads in secular worship of a 20-something's innate need to romanticize their life visions of nice dresses and sunsets, the epicenter of the world awaiting your arrival, hope that your beauty and grace will never fade. Stone, this album combined a lot of previous versions of Swift, seemingly capping off her country roots embraced. Has become one of the biggest popstars on the planet its new polish poise... Breaking whats new and whats next since 1952 one of the biggest on. 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