Last Thursday night the anticipated album Lover by Taylor Swift was released. After her last dark album, reputation, this was a highly anticipated album, since no one knew what was to come next. However, her new album is sonically cohesive throughout the entire album and is lyrically one of the best albums this year. 

The album starts with a song called I Forgot That You Existed, which she explained was her bringing herself out of the reputation era. In the lyric breakdown, Swift says, “reputation for me was about grieving the loss of your reputation and all of the phases you go through. Well, I guess I’m over it now because I forgot that you existed.”  As the album goes on she has pop songs like Cruel Summer, a song about a desperate summer love that was doomed from the start. With Paper Rings, she explains how when you find a love that really matters, materialistic things don’t matter. She proves with each song on the album that she’s still ruling as the queen of pop. 

She further proves she’s the queen in The Man, where she sings about the perception of what life would be like if she was a man. With lyrics like “When everyone believes ya, what’s that like?”it’s clear she’s breaking huge gender boundaries and shedding light on these important issues. In another song, Miss Americana and The Heartbreak Prince, she explains in a metaphorical high school setting the craziness of politics and inequality. The entire song addresses how the system of politics is unfair, hidden behind a figurative love story in high school. In the midst of all these pop songs, Swift also includes some ballads, like the title track Lover and The Archer. My personal favorite right now is Cornelia Street because of the production behind it and the simple fact that lyrically, this is one of her best songs. It is able to tell a story on its own perfectly.

The album sold almost a million pure copies pre-release and the album has reached over 600 million streams on Spotify within a few days of its release. On Metacritic, the album was scored an 80 and a user score rating of 9.3 and now, it’s the highest rated album on the website in history. Swift fan or not, the album is important for this day and age because of her quick approach in lyrics on hot controversial topics today.