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So here we are again…again. And honestly, we should have seen this one coming. Of course, Taylor Swift, stuck in quarantine like the rest of us, decided to release an entirely new collection of 17 songs as a sequel to her standout Folklore, unleashing it to the world with as little warning as the last. Increasingly may be your own album, but it is also an extension of Folklore – a “sister album”, as Swift calls it. And what better way to give a second life to such a heavy composition project? Instead of the endless coordinated music videos, live shows, and photo shoots that have tied each of her last five albums under one giant aesthetic umbrella, Swift has doubled down on FolkloreThemes of storytelling and contemporary mythology by, well, writing more songs.
With Increasingly Harnessing her older sister’s tide of success, Swift and her team had even more freedom to do whatever they wanted, and that is reflected in the music. He works here again with Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff and Justin Vernon from Bon Iver, and although FolkloreThe moody, indie-inspired sound remains the dominant feature of Increasingly, there is room for more variety and experimentation this time. The wicked country murder ballad “No Woman, No Crime,” starring Este and Danielle Haim, rubs shoulders with the flickering chamber pop song “Gold Rush.” Swift sings warmly against the honky-tonk piano on “Dorothea” and then, in the complete opposite direction, artificially distorts her voice on the seething “Closure”, using Bon Iver’s. Messina vocal edit to turn its soft ringing into a barely contained robotic growl. It’s a refreshing change of pace – Swift’s usual approach to dabbling in new genres or sounds is to go balls to the wall, but in Increasingly, she’s just as good at curating these more detailed production flourishes, all with the same contour and meticulousness as she does her best lyrics.
Storytelling songs remain the heart of the matter in Increasingly, and Swift has a whole new cast of characters to join Betty, James, Rebecca, and the rest of her previous Long Pond sessions. “’Tis the Damn Season” features Dorothea, a Hollywood actress who returns to her hometown and meets a high school sweetheart on a very grown-up date. We can hear her version of the story in “Dorothea”, as she longs for her to close the distance between them: “You have brilliant friends since you left town / A small screen is the only place I see you now.” But unlike the teenage love triangle that ran through downtown Folklore, there are few clear conclusions for Increasinglystories. A woman breaks up with her college sweetheart the night she planned to propose; Two scammers fall in love and promise each other an impossible life of stability. In “Tolerate It,” one of Swift’s most damning relationship vignettes to date, the love of one person meets the cruel indifference of the other half. “I wait at the door like I’m a child / Use my best colors for your portrait / Set the table with the fancy shit / And I see how you tolerate it,” Swift chirps, making the situation sound convincingly like destiny. worse than death.
Of course, none of these stories is executed more or less delicately than those of Folklore. Either by design or simply by the songs you decided to put on which album, IncreasinglyThe most revealing moments come when Swift returns to mythmaking herself. “Marjorie”, the closest thing the album has to a centerpiece, is a brilliant and devastating piece, an instant classic in Swift canon. Anyone familiar with the charity track “Ronan” she is aware that Swift can write a bloody eulogy, and here she paints her own grandmother Margaret Finley as an indelible force, a woman much like her but whose full story she can never tell. “What died didn’t stay dead / What died didn’t stay dead,” Swift sings firmly. “You are alive, you are alive, in my head.” It’s hard to think of another song that so perfectly captures the late tragedy of losing a loved one when you’re too young to see its full value.
If Swift seems hesitant to give her characters happy endings, or endings in general, it may be because she is still discovering her next chapter on the page. “I was dancing when the music stopped / And in disbelief / I can’t face the reinvention / I still haven’t met my new self,” he sings on “Happiness,” a track he recorded a week before the album came out. . It’s a beautiful ambient song, reminiscent of Chromatics without the rhythms of the four on the floor, and while seemingly singing about divorce, Swift touches on much more: nuanced acts of forgiveness, complex personal stories, the ability to visualize and know how a person can see themselves in different shades of light. Swift is certainly still the master at writing a spiteful kiss, but the songs of Increasingly they are a welcome step in a more mature direction, the result of months and months of getting lost in the woods and questioning your way forward. By the time you’re reading this, she may have already found the answer.
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