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      Review: ‘Midnights’ Finds Taylor Swift Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

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      The singer-songwriter’s 10th studio album returns to the pop sound she left in 2019, and explores a familiar subject: how she is perceived, and how she perceives herself.Taylor Swift has always been at her best when writing about Taylor Swift — she is diaristically pinpoint, a ruthless excavator of her own internal tugs of war. But she also thrives when writing about “Taylor Swift” — the idea, the metanarrative, the character. Swift sees the world seeing her, and rather than shut it out, she absorbs it, making those points of view her own, too. Kind of.It’s those songs that stand out on “Midnights,” her overly familiar sounding and spotty 10th studio album, which is in places a careful recitation of raw love, in others a flashback to past romantic indignities, but maybe most pointedly and effectively a commentary on what it feels like to live as a deeply observed figure, constantly narrativized by others.“Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism, like some kind of congressman?” Swift muses on “Anti-Hero,” an eerily shimmering Kate Bush-esque number that’s one of the album’s high points. “Tale as old as time.” At the hook, she returns again and again to the eye-rolled self-own, “I’m the problem, it’s me.” In the song’s video, Swift tosses back drinks with a more exuberantly unhinged version of herself, and a third giantess Swift hovers over the proceedings, bumbling and lightly melancholy.On “Mastermind,” the album’s sparkly closer, she paints her villain origin story, if you’re inclined to see her as a villain: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/To make them love me and make it seem effortless.”Into each pop star life, some outside perspective must intrude, and Swift has long spun gold from that raw material. But there are limitations to this approach, and Swift has hit a junction all superstars eventually arrive at — whether to continue to reckon with the past, or to forge forward boldly into the future.On this count, Swift is mainly looking backward on “Midnights,” an album that often plays like an extension of her 2019 LP “Lover,” which was similarly inconsistent, though fuller-sounding. The songs here are filled to the brim with syrupy synths, giving the album an astral, slow-motion effect, as if Swift were trapped in a reverb chamber.The Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s Music New LP: “Midnight,” Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Here is what our critic thought of it. Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings of her older albums: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose.After a handful of albums that felt like pivots ranging from soft to hard — bonkers pop on “1989”; (relatively) edgy experimentation on “Reputation”; earthy, pandemic isolation character studies on “Folklore” and “Evermore” — “Midnights” feels like a concession to an older, safer idea of Swift, full of songs that are capable and comfortable but often insufficient.Sometimes, those old modes serve her well. On “Karma,” a largely dim song with an aggressively plastic sound, there’s a twinkle in her voice toward the end when she exhales, “Karma’s a relaxing thought/Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?” On the woozy “Question…?” she’s equally tart: “What’s that that I heard, that you’re still with her?/That’s nice, I’m sure that’s what’s suitable.”But some of the lyrics can be lackluster and bluntly imagistic, with little of the detail that made Swift one of the signature pop songwriters of the 21st century: “Don’t put me in the basement/When I want the penthouse of your heart,” she sings on the metallic and tense “Bejeweled.”“Snow on the Beach,” a collaboration with fellow Great American Songwriter Lana Del Rey, begins with light Christmas music energy and never really ascends. Del Rey excels at a kind of rumbling, oozy stasis — it’s like the ecstasy of being caught in a spider’s web — but Swift’s vocals are a mite too cheery to achieve the same effect.Perversely, though, much of the rest of “Midnights,” which was produced by Swift with her regular collaborator Jack Antonoff, constrains her voice. Throughout the album, on songs like “You’re On Your Own, Kid” and “Maroon,” Swift’s vocals are stacked together to the point of suffocation. Only on “Sweet Nothing,” the romantic playground lullaby Swift wrote with her longtime romantic partner, Joe Alwyn (the actor who uses the pen name William Bowery), does she approach her signature wide-eyed vulnerability.A couple of songs point a way out of the fog. The fleet, breezy and lightly damp “Lavender Haze” includes some sweet singing, though it feels overly reminiscent of the thumping digital folk of Maggie Rogers’s “Alaska.”And the album’s high point is “Vigilante ____,” a slinky, moody electro-cabaret exhale about an antagonist that teems with narrative verve: “Draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man/You did some bad things but I’m the worst of them.” Here, Swift is leaning into the character version of herself — it’s funny, wry, slightly perturbing. Swift at her self-referential apex.Apart from her pandemic pivot to the bucolic, Swift has been devoting time to rerecordings of her old albums, an offshoot of the ownership battles spurred by the sale of her old masters. Such energy might be good for business, but bad for art. Perhaps similarly, “Midnights” by and large feels like a fuzzy Xerox of old accomplishments. (At 3 a.m. Friday, Swift released seven bonus tracks, which are comparatively chaotic. Of the new songs, only “Glitch” and “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” aren’t subtractive.)There is, perhaps, a slightly more cynical read to the sonic choices on “Midnights”: Swift hasn’t toured since 2018, after “Reputation.” The songs from “Lover” have never seen a big stage (and the songs from “Folklore” and “Evermore” largely weren’t designed for one). “Midnights” feels like a sonic place holder, with stadiums in mind.Which all prompts the question of where Swift might go as a midcareer pop star, if she were to pivot once more. Many of the other avenues currently open don’t apply to her — the emotionally icy nu-disco of Dua Lipa; a vocal and cultural flexibility that would allow her to freely collaborate with Latin or K-pop stars. There are songs on “Midnights” — “Midnight Rain,” “Lavender Haze” — that suggest an awareness of the ways Drake and the Weeknd have deployed overcast mood in their vocal and musical production, though she rarely commits. (There are also some not wholly cogent pitch-shifted vocals.) And she rather steadfastly has resisted a return to country, or pop-country, or country-pop.But a template for such a perspective-twisting album already exists: It’s called “Reputation,” and Swift released it in 2017. It was, at the time, somewhat derided, and deeply wrongly at that. Rarely has Swift sounded so amused, so aggrieved, so willing to reckon with the chasm between her self-perception and the perception of everyone else. It was a rowdy, sticky and unrelentingly clever album in which Swift took on herself, and also the world. “Taylor Swift” — bring her back.Taylor Swift“Midnights”(Republic) More

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      Taylor Swift Releases ‘Midnights,’ Her 10th Studio Album

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      The singer-songwriter’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff.The Easter eggs have been thoroughly examined for clues. The marbled vinyl has been pressed and sorted into collectible variants. The fan hashtags are cued up.It is time for a new Taylor Swift album.“Midnights,” Swift’s 10th studio LP, was released at midnight on Friday, the latest chapter in what has been an extraordinarily productive couple of years for Swift, who at 32 remains one of the most potent creative forces in music. She announced the 13-track “Midnights” two months ago, calling it “the story of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” and “a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.” (True Swifties — or, really, anybody who has paid moderate attention to Swift’s public presentation over the years — knows her fascination with the number 13.)It is Swift’s fifth album in just over two years, following her quarantine-era, indie-folk-style “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and then “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the first two rerecordings of her early albums, a project she undertook after her former record label was sold without her participation. “Folklore” won album of the year at the Grammys in 2021.In a sense, “Midnights” is Swift’s return to the pop pipeline after her digressions of the past couple of years. Many of the lyrics, as she suggested, resemble late-night ruminations, pondering life’s pressures, aging, the meaning of love. On the third track, “Anti-Hero,” she sings:I have this thing where I get older but just never wiserMidnights become my afternoonsWhen my depression works the graveyard shiftAll of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the roomAccording to the album’s credits, most of the songs were written and recorded with her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, and much of it was recorded at Antonoff’s home studio in Brooklyn and at Electric Lady Studios, the Greenwich Village warren founded by Jimi Hendrix.Lana Del Rey is a featured guest, singing on the track “Snow on the Beach.” Some other intriguing names also pop up in the credits. The actress Zoë Kravitz, who has been making an album with Antonoff, is listed as one of the six songwriters of the first track, “Lavender Haze,” alongside Swift, Antonoff, Mark Anthony Spears (a.k.a. the producer Sounwave), Jahaan Sweet and Sam Dew. Swift’s friendship with Kravitz, as fans know, is close enough that she once acted as an uncredited assistant on a pandemic-era remote photo shoot of Kravitz for The New York Times Magazine.Another song, “Sweet Nothing,” was written by Swift with one William Bowery — an unfamiliar name that popped up in the credits to “Folklore,” which Swift later acknowledged was a pseudonym for the actor Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend. “They said the end is coming/Everyone’s up to something,” she sings on the track. “I find myself running home to your sweet nothings.”“Midnights” stands a very good chance of being one of the year’s biggest sellers. Swift’s marketing this time has involved a series of kitschy videos on TikTok that revealed song titles, one at time, taken from Ping-Pong balls in a basket, as if on a decades-old local TV spot. Swift even displayed her release-week plan on Instagram, with items laid out on a daily calendar: a “special very chaotic surprise” on Friday at 3 a.m. Eastern time; the release of the music video for “Anti-Hero” at 8 a.m.; “The Tonight Show” on Monday.The surprise turned out to be an expanded version of the album, titled “Midnights (3am Edition),” with seven additional songs, some featuring writing and production from Swift’s “Folklore” and “Evermore” collaborator Aaron Dessner. On social media, Swift called the extra material “other songs we wrote on our journey,” and described the standard 13-track version of “Midnights” as “a complete concept album.”The video for “Anti-Hero,” written and directed by Swift, is a comic portrayal of Swift’s worries about her public image overshadowing her private life, set as a campy retro horror movie, complete with a tan rotary phone with the line cut. The clip includes a skit dramatizing the song’s lines about a dream in which Swift’s family reads her will after “my daughter-in-law kills me for the money.”Beside the coffin we see a portrait of gray-haired Swift cradling a bunch of cats, while her heirs Preston (the stand-up Mike Birbiglia), Kimber (Mary Elizabeth Ellis from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) and Chad (the comedian John Early) argue over whether the line “to my children I leave 13 cents” contains a secret encoded message that means something else. Then they read: “P.S. There’s no secret encoded message that means something else.”Swift announced the cast of actors for other videos from the album, including Laura Dern, Laith Ashley, Dita Von Teese, Pat McGrath, Antonoff and the three members of the band Haim.An important factor in the sales and chart prospects for “Midnights” may be Swift’s embrace of physical music formats like CDs and vinyl LPs, which, because of the way Billboard crunches data about how music is consumed, can have a major impact on chart positions. Swift is releasing four standard versions of “Midnights” on vinyl, each with its own disc color and cover art; they also correspond to four variant CD versions. “Collect all 4 editions!” Swift’s website says. Target, which has had a long relationship with Swift, has its own exclusive LP version (on “lavender” vinyl) as well as a CD with three exclusive tracks.The most ingenious or shameless part — take your pick — of Swift’s vinyl strategy is what she has done with the back covers. When turned around and placed on a grid, the four editions display 12 numbers that, when arranged properly, form the hours of a clock. “It could help you tell time,” Swift said, perfectly deadpan, in a recent Instagram video.And not just that. For $49, Swift’s website sells the actual clock — a kit including four walnut wood shelves to hold the LP jackets, “with brass metal clock center piece,” the description reads, “with 2 wooden hands that each have ‘Taylor Swift’ printed in brass ink.”The site adds: “While supplies last.” More

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      A New Taylor Swift LP? Metacritic Crunches the Reviews, as Fans Watch.

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      As pop fandoms go to battle on social media wielding data about their favorite stars, Metascores averaging critical opinions have become ammunition, much to the site’s chagrin.For Metacritic, a website that collects and quantifies reviews of music, movies, TV shows and video games, a Taylor Swift album drop is one of the best days of the year.“There’s nothing quite like Taylor Swift,” Marc Doyle, 51, one of the site’s founders, said in an interview last week. “We get a great deal of traffic and user participation, a lot of people sharing it on social media.” In 2020, when Swift released “Folklore,” her eighth studio album, traffic swelled by “roughly a half million page views,” including user review pages, he said.Metacritic, as its name suggests, aggregates entertainment criticism using a principle of meta-analysis, stripping reviews of their qualitative assessments and assigning them a value between 0 and 100. And it has helped turn pop culture into a game of sabermetrics.Its tallies, known as Metascores, started off simply as a consumer guide. But over the past decade, as music superfans have gone to battle on social media wielding data — sales and streaming figures, Billboard chart positions, tour grosses, number of Grammys won — Metascores have increasingly become ammunition. Passionate fan armies keep careful track of the scoreboard, and one of the most fervent is devoted to Swift, who will release her 10th studio album, “Midnights,” on Friday.But who is behind Metacritic, and how does it tabulate its figures?In 1999, Jason Dietz, like Doyle, a graduate from the U.S.C. Gould School of Law, had the idea for a website that applied meta-analysis to a range of media, and asked Doyle to join his effort to build one. (The movie aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes went live that year, but Dietz was unaware of it.) Dietz, the site’s current features editor, had learned how to code HTML, creating websites including one called List of Possible Band Names.In late 1999, Doyle’s sister and her husband contributed the majority of Metacritic’s start-up fund. (Earlier this month, Metacritic and six other sites were acquired by Fandom, a developer of entertainment platforms dedicated to superfans, in a deal estimated at $50 million; Doyle declined to comment on the sale.) Together, they began poring over thousands of print and online reviews, compiling them into an Excel spreadsheet and organizing them according to their own schematics — what would soon become their trademark Metascores.Doyle said the group started making daily visits to publications that run reviews. “Every time they publish a review, you throw it in the system,” he said. “Once you get to four reviews, then you generate the Metascore, which is an average score.” For the games section, the site sends outlets a list of questions “so you can really get to know their scoring philosophy,” he added, a process it has only recently started “for potential movies section partners.”Metacritic went live in January 2001 with a film vertical and a rundown of how its staff calculated Metascores. For letter grades (used by publications like Entertainment Weekly), an A represents 100, while an F corresponds to zero. For reviews that aren’t assigned an alphanumeric value, the site’s staff — Metacritic currently has five full-time employees who work remotely from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas and Portland, Ore. — will assess the tone of the review before assigning a value themselves.Metacritic’s page for Swift’s 2017 album “Reputation,” which divided critics. The website Consequence of Sound recently said it regretted its D+ rating. “We get comments all the time like, ‘This review seems so much better than a 3/10,’ so then I’ll take that comment to another editor, ask what they think, and we’ll give it a reread,” Doyle wrote over email. “Over the years, we’ve also been lobbied to either de-publish a review or drop a publication from our system for a variety of reasons. If it’s not a case of plagiarism or fraud (which usually is self-reported from a member publication), such appeals are generally unsuccessful.”Before they are averaged, the scores are weighted according to the critic’s perceived prestige and volume of reviews. “From the very beginning we’ve believed there are so many critics out there who are so incredible at what they do — why should they be treated exactly the same as a brand-new critic at a regional paper?” Doyle said.But Metacritic declined to explain more about which publications and critics are given priority status. “That’s really the secret sauce,” Doyle said. So, how do they avoid biases? “You just have to trust us,” he added. “We’re a professional outfit.” The site makes money from advertising, licensing Metascores and affiliate revenue.Metacritic’s music section began in March 2001 with a scoreboard of recent album releases. Pulling data from 30 publications — today, that number has expanded to 49 — on launch day, Aimee Mann’s “Bachelor No. 2” ranked highest with a Metascore of 90, while Juliana Hatfield’s “Pony: Total System Failure” landed lowest with a Metascore of 25. (The site has tracked reviews from 131 sites in its history.)For almost a decade, the section didn’t gain much online traction. Attention remained mostly fixed on the site’s games vertical, which has had the “greatest notoriety and impact,” Doyle explained; its metrics have affected game design, marketing strategies, even employee compensation.In an interview, the game designer Chris Avellone said that in 2010, Bethesda, the publisher of the game Fallout: New Vegas, “chose to include a clause in the contract that said if you deliver a title with a Metacritic score above 84, we’ll give you a bonus.” The game missed by one point.Metacritic began playing a larger role in music around the same time. In December 2009, after collating 7,000 reviews, the site released its first top artists of the decade list. Its No. 1 came as a surprise: Spoon, the indie-rock band.Before long, users began posting Metascores on Twitter as empirical proof that an artist had succeeded or failed. “Kanye got 93 on Metacritic, Taylor Swift got 75. Yeezy Forever!” one fan tweeted in 2010.“People used Metascores as an argument settler, a metric to put in each other’s faces,” Doyle said. “That really was not the intention of the site, and we hate to see it used as a sword or shield to go into battle with different pop fandoms.”Critics themselves got caught in the crossfire. In 2016, an anonymous Ariana Grande fan started a petition against Christopher R. Weingarten, a writer who had reviewed Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” for Rolling Stone. In June 2020, a Pitchfork editor was doxxed and threatened after writing what fans perceived as an unjust review of Swift’s “Folklore” that would lower its Metascore.“I’ve heard from critics whose inboxes have been slammed with complaints,” Doyle said, noting that low scores are often equated with bias. “Despite this, we certainly want to encourage critics to tell it like it is.”Swift, who has a particularly active online fan base, has been the spark for other Metacritic dust-ups. The music site Consequence of Sound announced last month that one of its biggest regrets was giving her 2017 album, “Reputation,” a D+ and “screwing up the Metacritic score.”The idea of scoring artists may seem unnecessary or make some critics uncomfortable — Rolling Stone recently abolished its star rankings — but there’s a strong appetite among listeners to have numbers at their fingertips. Perkins Miller, the chief executive of Fandom Inc., compared Metacritic to the N.F.L. — where he previously worked — and its Next Gen stats platform, noting, “There is a greater crossover between sports fans and music fans today.”Among very online pop fans, data capital is tied to social capital. “Metacritic is always brought up on Taylor Swift Twitter,” said PJ Medina, a 21-year-old fan from the Philippines. “If she gets a high score, it means that she’s critically acclaimed. It means that more people will care.” More

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      Popcast Live! The New Faces of 2022

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFor the first live taping of Popcast, held at Gertie in Brooklyn, members of The New York Times pop music team explored the ways music is evolving today by highlighting some of this year’s breakout stars. The conversation touched on the British rapper Central Cee, the Bronx drill rapper Ice Spice, the country-folk singer Zach Bryan, the alt-rock revivalist Blondshell, the haunted pop crooner Ethel Cain and more.The conversation included debate about what makes for innovation in the crowded and confusing pop music marketplace in 2022, and an audience Q. and A. session touching on Taylor Swift, the persistence of physical media and much more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      In Toronto, Films by Women About Women, but That’s Where the Similarities End

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      The Toronto International Film Festival returns to business mostly as usual with throngs of excited attendees and some of the year’s most anticipated new movies.Each year, filmgoers of all persuasions, casual viewers and true believers both, descend on the Toronto International Film Festival to sample and to gorge. Cannes has the red carpet, Telluride has Oscar contenders and Sundance has the next big thing, maybe. Toronto has bulk. It’s stuffed with movies of every type, size, style and ambition. Some are destined for immortality and others will enter the Oscar marathon that has already begun. Still other titles will languish on streaming platforms; some of these will deserve better fates.The festival, which ends Sunday, returned to full capacity this month after two years of severely limited in-person screenings. With mask mandates and other restrictions lifted, the crowds in theaters felt close to prepandemic levels, though not at their crushing worst. The throngs outside its main locations were marginally thinner, too, though they surged like tidal waves for the flashiest guests, notably Taylor Swift (accompanying her suitably titled 10-minute “All Too Well: The Short Film”) and Harry Styles (one of the stars of the gay period romance “My Policeman”).“Harry, Harry, Harry!” I heard one afternoon, as I rushed to a screening, past men and women racing toward a scrum of security personnel and parked black S.U.V.s. If Swift and Styles start making more movies and in-person appearances, theatrical distribution might have a chance to recover. Toronto may not do glamour all that well, but over the years it has transformed into an essential industry destination partly by “eventizing” itself, creating an 11-day spectacle for attendees and gawkers alike while serving as a launchpad for new movies like “The Woman King,” which opens Friday.Viola Davis in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Woman King.”Ilze Kitshoff/Sony PicturesToronto skims a lot of cream from other festivals, giving audiences early peeks at the major titles that will be much discussed in coming months. And while journalists can often preview these offerings back home, it’s a singular experience seeing new movies with packed audiences, witnessing how jokes land and surprises shock. One movie that’s guaranteed to play extremely well is Laura Poitras’s elegantly structured documentary about the photographer Nan Goldin, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which just won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. A personal-meets-the-political portrait that goes deep on Goldin’s opium-epidemic activism, it left the audience audibly moved; the distributor should hand out tissues with every ticket.Spotify should ready itself for an uptick in streaming of Louis Armstrong’s music. One highlight of my festival week was the documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” which was directed by Sacha Jenkins, son of the filmmaker Horace B. Jenkins. (Apple has the documentary, but Sacha Jenkins said before one screening that it would also open in theaters.) Drawing on Armstrong’s vast personal archive — including reels of his taped musings — the movie builds beautifully into a portrait of a genius as well as the country that he graced and that didn’t give him the love he deserved. The music is of course brilliant, though some critics wanted more musicology to go with it.The audience I saw “Louis Armstrong” with seemed thrilled. The hothouse environment of festivals can be wildly misleading simply because people are so pumped to be in attendance, which can make widely reported metrics like the duration of standing ovations meaningless (boos are far more instructive). But watching a movie with other festivalgoers invariably heats up and enlivens a room, creates an electric vibe, though it helps when directors introduce their work. Steven Spielberg did just that for the premiere of “The Fabelmans,” a wistful coming-of-age story about a young film lover who grows up to become, well, you know.Paul Dano, left, Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord and Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans,” about Steven Spielberg’s coming-of-age.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentWritten by Spielberg and his frequent collaborator, Tony Kushner, the story tracks the awakening, cinematic and otherwise, of the young Sammy (played as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle). The kid is the least interesting part of the movie, which perhaps sounds funny and even insulting but makes sense given that it’s about someone who grows up to make larger-than-life (Spielbergian!) fantasies. The father is played by Paul Dano, who seems to have borrowed Michael Stuhlbarg’s voice for the role, but the movie is anchored by Michelle Williams’s sensitive performance as the mother, Mitzi. Williams’s affecting intensity gives the movie regular shocking jolts of passion, attenuating its otherwise overly easy, overly familiar flow.“The Fabelmans” didn’t set the festival on fire; its restraint and lightly elegiac mood are unlikely to get most pulses racing, even if these qualities serve it extremely well. As he did in his version of “West Side Story,” which was also written by Kushner, Spielberg embraces a kind of poetic realism in “The Fabelmans” that I’m still getting a handle on. He’s looking at his own life through the mist, as you would expect. And while he shows the tears, if not necessarily the snot, Spielberg is also, in his singular way, engaging with some of the corrosive truths about his childhood, particularly with respect to Mitzi. It’s an interesting movie that I look forward to revisiting.Mitzi Fabelman is just one of the many women characters who made this year’s Toronto memorable. Another is Lib Wright, the brisk British nurse played by a strong Florence Pugh in the period drama “The Wonder.” Directed by Sebastián Lelio from Emma Donoghue’s novel, it follows Lib as she journeys to an isolated village in 19th-century rural Ireland, where she’s been employed by some stern local men to observe a girl, Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), who’s said not to have eaten in months. Is her fast a miracle, a scam, or something else? Not all of Lelio’s choices work, specifically his decision to call attention to the movie’s artifice (it opens and closes on a soundstage), but its horror and righteous fury are undeniable.Florence Pugh in “The Wonder,” set in 19th-century Ireland.NetflixPart of what made the bounty of all these women characters so pleasurable is that a fair number appear in movies directed by women. In the not-distant past, women often felt boxed in by their subjects, though especially by their modest resources. That’s less the case now, and day after day at Toronto, you could watch all manner of female-driven pictures, from spectacles to chamber pieces. Some women were as recognizable as your own life (if generally more interesting) and others were entirely, engagingly different. For someone who makes a living primarily writing about movies made by men with men and for men, it was especially gratifying.That was the case even when the movies didn’t entirely work or felt off the mark. I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of “Emily,” a moving, sexually charged drama about Emily Brontë directed by the actress Frances O’Connor. Certainly I never heard about some of the wilder things that this Emily (an excellent Emma Mackey) does throughout her tumultuous, tragically abbreviated, dramatically inflected life. Even so, with its performances, its unabashed romanticism and visual choices — landscapes, textures, gleaming light and bodies — the movie persuasively opens up an artistic consciousness, showing how Brontë became the writer that she did. However fanciful its portrait of the artist as a young woman, it’s very effective.Alice Diop’s electric contemporary drama “Saint Omer” turns on a very different question of truth. Set partly in a French courtroom, it centers on a young writer, Rama (Kayije Kagame), sitting in on the trial of another woman, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), who’s admitted to drowning her baby. Intellectually galvanizing and emotionally harrowing, the story explores motherhood, race and postcolonial France with control, lucidity and compassion. It’s an extraordinary work that’s all the more impressive because it’s the first fiction feature from Diop, who’s an established documentarian.“Saint Omer” will be on the slate in the forthcoming New York Film Festival and so will “The Eternal Daughter,” from the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg. It too concerns motherhood, though in a different register and to dissimilar ends. It focuses on a relationship between a mother-and-daughter duo, similar characters who are both played with distinct nuance by Tilda Swinton. The story largely takes place at a grand hotel where the two have come for an intimate, progressively more fraught getaway. Over the course of the story, the time frame subtly, at times comically, shifts, as does the relationship, which — like Swinton’s twinned performances — proves devastating. More

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      Taylor Swift Announces a New Album, ‘Midnights’

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      The LP, described by Swift as “the story of 13 sleepless nights,” is due Oct. 21. It will be her 10th studio album, and her fifth release in just over two years.We already knew that Taylor Swift was a restless creative force. Now we know that she is also an insomniac one.Late Sunday, Swift announced her 10th studio album, “Midnights,” to be released on Oct. 21, which she described on social media as “the story of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.”“This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams,” she added. “The floors we pace and the demons we face.” An image posted to Instagram, sure to be pored over for clues, shows Swift posed at a table in dim light, resting her head in one hand and holding out the receiver of a landline phone in the other.“Midnights,” which Swift began selling through pre-orders on her website — available on “moonstone blue marble” vinyl and CD, as well as on cassette and download — will be the singer’s fifth album in just over two years. In 2020 she released a pair of LPs recorded in quarantine, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” (“Folklore,” which arrived in July 2020, won the Grammy for album of the year.) And in 2021 came “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the first of her planned series of rerecorded simulacra of her old albums — a move, prompted by the sale of Swift’s old record label without her participation, that gave her new control over her recordings.The cover of Swift’s “Midnights.”Fans have been buzzing about a possible new version of “1989,” her pop breakthrough from 2014, especially since a new version of “Bad Blood,” from that album, was used in the soundtrack to “DC League of Super-Pets,” a new animated comedy film.“Midnights” will come too late to qualify for the next Grammy Awards; the eligibility window for the 65th annual ceremony closes on Sept. 30. But, particularly with its robust offerings on physical media, the album has a strong possibility of becoming one of the year’s biggest commercial successes, rivaling releases like Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” (which had the biggest opening of the year, thanks in part to vinyl sales), Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” and Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack.Swift’s competition this year has also been notably soft. Despite the arrival of new albums by high-profile artists — Drake, Lizzo, Post Malone, Megan Thee Stallion, even BTS — few have had huge debut weeks or much staying power on the charts; one of the few new releases that has held fast in the Top 5 lately is Beyoncé’s “Renaissance,” which also had the biggest opening for a woman this year. The last artist to sell a million copies in a week was Swift, with “Reputation” in 2017.Swift teased the announcement of “Midnights” late Sunday in an acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards, where “All Too Well: The Short Film” — from her “Red” rerecording project — won three awards, including video of the year. About an hour later, her website began taking orders. More

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      Beyoncé’s ‘Break My Soul,’ and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Taylor Swift, the Mars Volta, Gorillaz featuring Thundercat and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Beyoncé, ‘Break My Soul’The first song from Beyoncé’s album due July 29, “Renaissance,” has a clubby house beat and an attitude that equates defiant self-determination with salvation. She and her co-producers, Tricky Stewart and The-Dream, work two chords and a four-on-the-floor thump into a constantly changing track. They sampled shouted advice — “Release your anger! Release your mind! Release your job! Release the time!” — from “Explode” by the New Orleans bounce rapper Big Freedia. Beyoncé extrapolates from there: joining the Great Resignation, building “my own foundation,” insisting on love and self-love, facing every obstacle with the pledge that “You won’t break my soul.” When she invokes the soul, a gospel choir arrives to affirm her inner strength, as if anyone could doubt it. JON PARELESGorillaz featuring Thundercat, ‘Cracker Island’A kind of living cartoon character in his own right, the charismatic bassist Thundercat is a natural fit in the Gorillaz universe — so much so that it’s almost surprising he’s never collaborated with them before. Thundercat’s insistent bass line and backing vocals add a funky jolt to the group’s “Cracker Island,” a sleek and summery jam that happens to be about … a made-up cult? Thankfully the tune doesn’t get bogged down by anything too conceptual, though, and invites the listener to simply lock into its blissed-out groove. LINDSAY ZOLADZElizabeth King, ‘I Got a Love’The Memphis-based vocalist Elizabeth King once seemed headed toward gospel stardom. In the early 1970s, she and a group of all-male backing singers, the Gospel Souls, scored a radio hit and won the Gospel Gold Cup award, presented by the city’s gospel D.J.s. But then King stepped back, spending decades raising 15 children; her public performances were limited to singing on a weekly gospel radio program. It wasn’t until last year that King, now in her 70s, released her first full album, the impressive “Living in the Last Days.” She returns this week with “I Got a Love.” On the title track, King reprises the sultry style of praise-singing that she had perfected in the 1970s, telling us about her rock-sturdy romance with God over a slow and savory tempo. Behind her, a tube-amplified guitar slices out riffs, an organ alternates between full chords and long rests, and a heavy, pushing bass keeps the band’s muscles flexed. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAmanda Shires, ‘Take It Like a Man’The title track from Amanda Shires’s upcoming album is a poetic and provocative torch song enlivened by an electrifying vocal performance. Featuring her husband Jason Isbell on guitar, “Take It Like a Man” is a sweeping ballad that continuously builds in blistering intensity — sort of like something Shires’s Highwomen bandmate Brandi Carlile might release. But the song is a showcase for the unique power of Shires’s voice, which is both nervy and tremblingly vulnerable at the same time. “I know the cost of flight is landing,” she sings as the melody ascends ever higher, “and I know I can take it like a man.” ZOLADZThe Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s MusicWith two quarantine albums and new recordings of her older albums, the pandemic has been a time of renewal and reinvention for Taylor Swift. A Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose. Reshifting the Power: The new 10-minute version of a bitter breakup song from 2012 can be seen as a woman’s attempt to fix an unbalanced relationship by weaponizing memories.Taylor Swift, ‘Carolina’“Carolina,” from the soundtrack to the forthcoming movie “Where the Crawdads Sing,” holds the distinction of being one of the spookiest songs in the Taylor Swift catalog; save for “No Body, No Crime,” it’s the closest she’s come to writing an outright murder ballad. Co-produced with Aaron Dessner, “Carolina” sounds of a piece with Swift’s folky pair of 2020 releases: The arrangement begins with just a sparsely strummed acoustic guitar that eventually swells into a misty atmosphere with the addition of strings and banjo. As on her 2015 single “Wildest Dreams,” there’s a hint of Lana Del Rey’s influence as Swift digs into her breathy lower register to intone ominously, “There are places I will never go, and things that only Carolina will ever know.” ZOLADZSessa, ‘Canção da Cura’“Canção da Cura” (“Song of Healing”) from the Brazilian songwriter Sessa’s new album, “Estrela Acesa” (“Burning Star”), hints at some clandestine ritual. In his gentle tenor, Sessa sings, “To the sound of the drums I’ll consume you.” Acoustic guitars and percussion set up an intricate mesh of syncopation, and in his gentle tenor, with hushed backup vocals overhead, Sessa sings, “To the sound of the drums I’ll consume you.” It’s a brief glimpse of a mystery. PARELESThe Mars Volta, ‘Blacklight Shine’After a decade of other projects, the wildly virtuosic, conundrum-slinging guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López and the singer and lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala have reunited as the Mars Volta, with a tour to start in September and a new song: “Blacklight Shine.” It’s a six-beat, bilingual rocker, full of complex percussion and scurrying guitar lines, with lyrics like, “the high control hex he obsessively pets with his thumbs/thinking no one’s watching but I got the copy that he can never erase.” But unlike many of Mars Volta’s past efforts, this one strives for catchiness, and its rolling rhythm and harmony vocals hint, unexpectedly, at Steely Dan, another band that tucked musical and verbal feats behind pop hooks. An extended “short film” connects the song’s underlying beat to the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Puerto Rican bomba. PARELESCKay featuring Davido, Focalistic and Abidoza, ‘Watawi’Commitment is an iffy thing; in “Watawi,” the Nigerian singers CKay and Davido and the South African rapper Focalistic stay evasive when girlfriends ask “What are we?” CKay suavely croons a non-answer: “We are what we are.” Keeping things up in the air is the production by Abidoza from South Africa, which hovers around a syncopated one-note pulse as it fuses the cool keyboard chords of South African amapiano with crisp Afrobeats percussion. In its final minute, the track introduces a fiddle that could easily lead to a whole new phase of the relationship. PARELESAlex G, ‘Runner’There’s something wonderfully uncanny about the music of Philadelphia’s Alex G. His songs often gesture toward familiar sounds and textures — “Runner,” from his forthcoming album “God Save the Animals” bears a melodic resemblance to, of all things, Soul Asylum’s early ’90s anthem “Runaway Train”— but their gradual accumulation of small, idiosyncratic sonic details produce an overall sense of strangeness. “Runner” initially sounds like warm, pleasant alt-rock pastiche, but before it can lull the listener into nostalgia, the song suddenly erupts with unruly emotion: “I have done a couple bad things,” Alex sings a few times with increasing desperation, before letting out a thrillingly unexpected scream. ZOLADZLil Nas X featuring YoungBoy Never Broke Again, ‘Late to da Party’Exile comes in many forms — sometimes it’s spiritual, sometimes it’s literal. The pop-rap phenom Lil Nas X recently took umbrage — seriously or not, who can tell — at not being nominated for a BET Award at this year’s ceremony. YoungBoy Never Broke Again remains on house arrest, one of rap’s most popular figures but one who’s achieved that success without the participation of traditional tastemakers. Together, they share the kinship of outsiders, even if they never quite align on this song, which is notionally aimed at BET; the video features a clip of someone urinating on a BET Award trophy. They are radically different artists — two different rapping styles, two different subject matter obsessions, two different levels of seriousness. By the end it feels as if they’re seeking exile from each other. JON CARAMANICATove Lo, ‘True Romance’“What does a girl like me want with you?” the Swedish songwriter Tove Lo asks in “True Romance,” a four-minute catharsis. The track uses only two synthesized chords and a slow pulse, but the vocal is pained, aching and constantly escalating the drama: a desperate human voice trying to escape an electronic grid. PARELESRachika Nayar, ‘Heaven Come Crashing’The composer Rachika Nayar explores the textural and orchestral possibilities of electric guitar and digital processing: effects, loops, layering. Much of her work has been meditative, and so is the beginning of “Heaven Come Crashing,” with shimmering, sustained washes of guitar and abstract vocals from Maria BC. But there’s a surprise midway through: a hurtling drumbeat kicks in, and what had been a weightless drift is suddenly a warp-speed surge forward. PARELESAbraham Burton and Eric McPherson, ‘Will Never Be Forgotten’In an alternate universe, the release of new music from the tenor saxophonist Abraham Burton and the drummer Eric McPherson would be a major event. Both are Gen X jazz eminences, and across decades playing together, their styles have grown in complement to one another. Burton holds long notes in a strong but wavery yowl or shoots out notes in string-like bursts, conveying a wounded tenderness in spite of all that volume and power. McPherson has a relatively gentle touch on the drums, but still channels the earth-moving polyrhythmic force of Elvin Jones. Last summer, these longtime musical partners gave a concert, joined by the bassist Dezron Douglas, as part of Giant Step Arts’ outdoor series at the old Seneca Village site in Central Park. The performance closed with “Will Never Be Forgotten,” a lament with a descending bass line and a melody that winds downward like a teardrop. A full recording of the concert was released on Juneteenth, as “The Summit Rock Session at Seneca Village.” RUSSONELLO More

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      Taylor Swift and Tyler, the Creator Excavate Old Love

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More