Taylor Swift is stuck in a 17-year-old’s mind

Who’s torturing who here? Sorry, sorry. That isn’t the freshest zinger to zing in the direction of this sprawling new Taylor Swift double album, but please know that after funnelling 19 of its 31 tracks through my headphones on Friday morning, my phone died, as if by its own volition.

Same for any hope I had that the overall mood might improve in the third act of this two-hour hostage situation, a despair made manifest once I located my charger and heard the lyric, “My friends used to play a game where we would pick a decade we wished we could live in … I’d say the 1830s, but without all the racists”.

As a 21st-century pop omnipresence, Swift remains mercilessly prolific and unwilling to edit for length, which makes this extended version of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, feel miserable and bottomless. The big surprise is how much of that misery is intentional.

In concussive contrast to the good times she’s been having in the public eye – highest grossing concert tour in the history of the species; highest grossing concert film to match; on-field kisses with her boyfriend after he won the Super Bowl – Swift’s new ballads are sour theatre, fixated on memories of being wronged and stranded, sodden with lyrics that feel clunky, convoluted, samey, purple and hacky.

That said, is this the album that finally grants us societal permission to say that Swift is not a great lyricist?

“At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one people put wedding rings on”, sings the most celebrated songwriter of her generation on her album’s title track, “and that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding”.

Oh, man. In The Manuscript, she sings in the third person, describing a flame who once “said that if the sex was half as good as the conversation was, soon they’d be pushing strollers”.

Attempting to further signal her maturity, Swift deploys profanity with awkward relentlessness across too many of these songs, sounding like a child test-driving her illicit new vocabulary in hopes of convincing the greater populace that she is, in fact, 34 years old.

Swift almost always steps back into the shallow end, dulling her ideas with reflexive cliches. Lightning appears in bottles. Wrinkles appear in time. Ships are abandoned or gone down with. Plans are best laid. Hearts are cold, cold.