Midnights
Midnights is the tenth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was released on October 21, 2022, through Republic Records. A concept album about nocturnal ruminations, it contains confessional songs that explore regret, self-criticism, fantasies, heartbreak, and infatuation. The lyrical details allude to Swift's personal life and fame.
Swift produced the standard edition of Midnights with Jack Antonoff, while Sounwave, Jahaan Sweet, and Keanu Beats each co-produced two tracks. The album is minimalist synth-pop, electropop, bedroom pop, and dream pop, with elements of electronica, hip-hop, and R&B. Its mid-tempo, electronic soundscape is characterized by analog synthesizers, sparse drum machine beats, and digitally manipulated vocals. Antonoff and Aaron Dessner co-produced an extended 3am Edition that was surprise-released three hours after the standard edition.
Swift announced Midnights at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards and unveiled the standard tracklist on the video-sharing platform TikTok. Midnights topped the charts and has received multi-platinum certifications in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom. In the United States, it became Swift's fifth album to debut atop the Billboard 200 with over one million first-week copies and the best-selling album of 2022, and it has been certified seven-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. Its songs made Swift the first artist to monopolize the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. It spawned three singles: "Anti-Hero" peaked at number one, and "Lavender Haze" and "Karma" both peaked at number two.
Music critics regarded Midnights as an amalgamation of Swift's earlier albums and lauded her autobiographical lyrics as engaging and more refined than before. Most reviews complimented the production as cohesive and tasteful, although some deemed it conventional. Numerous publications featured the album on their rankings of the best albums of 2022. At the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, Midnights made Swift the first artist to win Album of the Year four times, and it also won Best Pop Vocal Album. To support Midnights along with her other albums, Swift embarked on the Eras Tour from March 2023 to December 2024.
Background
The American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift began her career in country music in the 2000s, achieved global fame as a pop star in the 2010s, and earned critical acclaim as an indie folk songwriter after releasing the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore during the COVID-19 pandemic. She began re-recording her first six studio albums in November 2020, due to a 2019 dispute with the music executive Scooter Braun, who acquired Swift's former record label Big Machine and the masters of those albums. She released two re-recorded albums in 2021: Fearless and Red . Critics and academics deemed Swift's re-recordings a key event contributing to a wider industry discourse on artists' rights and artist–label relationships.Amidst the re-recording projects, Swift attracted media attention following her appearance at Haim's One More Haim Tour concert in London in July 2022; it was her first live performance since 2019. At the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards on August 28, during her acceptance speech for Video of the Year, she announced a new original studio album. After the show, Swift revealed the album title, Midnights, on her social media. This was met with surprise from her fans, who had expected another re-recorded album in 2022. On music streaming platforms, Midnights was labeled "pop", which attracted media and public speculation on its sonic direction, after the "alternative" labelings of Folklore and Evermore.
Lyrics and themes
For the standard edition of Midnights, Swift wrote 11 of the 13 tracks with Jack Antonoff, who had worked with her on every album since 1989. She wrote "Vigilante Shit" alone and "Sweet Nothing" with Joe Alwyn, who is credited under the pseudonym William Bowery. Other co-writers include Zoë Kravitz and Sam Dew, Jahaan Sweet and Sounwave, Keanu Beats, and Lana Del Rey. An extended 3am Edition containing seven additional tracks was written by Swift, who co-wrote four tracks with Antonoff and three with Aaron Dessner. Dew and Sounwave also shared writing credits on the track "Glitch".Swift framed Midnights as a concept album inspired by her "sleepless nights", informed by five themes: self-hatred, revenge fantasies, "wondering what might have been", falling in love, and "falling apart". She had used midnight as a lyrical motif to depict romantic sentiments of vulnerability, yearning, sensuality, or being haunted by memories. Expanding on these connotations, Midnights situates Swift's narrator as a woman examining her own psyche during the afterhours, when she confronts her reckonings about both her past and her future. A personal album, it again employed the autobiographical songwriting that had characterized Swift's albums before Folklore and Evermore, which consisted of fictional narratives and character studies.
The songs in Midnights are backward-looking contemplations on Swift's life, using confessional lyrical details that allude to her personal life and public image. The songs address diverse moods and emotions: self-criticism, self-confidence, ruminations on past decisions, hopes, fears, regrets, fantasies, and infatuation. Some music journalists argued that the broad themes resulted in Midnights being a loosely defined concept album; Alan Light of Esquire thought that the concept-album designation was questionable, despite the songs altogether constructing a cohesive record. Many songs are about those emotions ensuing from love. "Maroon" is about the haunting memories of a long-gone romance, while "Snow on the Beach" describes two people falling in love with each other at the same time. Swift ruminates over a broken relationship and how things could have turned out differently in "Question...?" and ponders the anxiety of falling in love again in "Labyrinth".
Many songs address Swift's fame and how it intertwines with her personal life. According to The New York Times
The songs "Vigilante Shit" and "Karma" have lyrics that conjecture revenge fantasies against one's rivals. In the former, Swift's character sides with the ex-lover of her nemesis in a revenge plot. The latter has comical lyrics about how Swift benefits from karma: her righteous actions reward her with good outcomes in life, and she need not worry about sabotaging her rivals. Self-assurance is the theme of "Bejeweled", which depicts finding one's self-worth after a breakup.
The 3am Edition tracks have varied themes; The Atlantic Shirley Li considered them more cathartic and metaphorical than the standard tracks. "The Great War" references World War I as an analogy of heartbreak, while "Would've, Could've, Should've" uses religious imagery to describe an adult woman's reflection on her traumatic loss of innocence during her adolescence. The vague, mournful lyrics of "Bigger Than the Whole Sky" are about losing something so soon without mentioning what exactly was lost. "Glitch" is about how an original plan of staying friends with somebody strays away to become a romance, and "Paris" sees Swift fantasizing about a romance in Paris while in her bedroom. In "High Infidelity", Swift's character takes responsibility for a failed relationship with no regrets. The 3am closing track, "Dear Reader", sees Swift beseeching her audience not to look up to her as a "guiding light".
Production and music
Swift recorded all of the tracks of the standard edition and some from the later release of Midnights at Antonoff's Rough Customer studio in Brooklyn and at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Two tracks created with other producers are "Lavender Haze" and "Karma". Sounwave created the first demo for "Lavender Haze" by experimenting with different sounds and "hitting one button by accident". He and Antonoff added vocal samples from Braxton Cook, and Swift helped complete the final production. After "Lavender Haze", Antonoff asked Sounwave if he had any additional music that could be suitable for Midnights. He then pitched to Antonoff a sample that Beats had created in 2019, and the production for the final track, "Karma", was completed after one day.Midnights has a minimalist, electronic production. Antonoff used the Yamaha DX7 and Oberheim OB-8 synths to create the demos, and the final melodies are generated by analog synthesizers that date back to the 1960s or 1970s, such as Moog, Mellotron, and Juno 6. The mid-tempo compositions are driven by sparse drum machine beats and synthesized or electronically manipulated vocals. Two tracks that have acoustic-leaning soundscapes are "You're on Your Own, Kid", which is driven by electric guitar strums, and "Sweet Nothing", by an electric piano and horns. Swift's words, vocals, and Antonoff's production emphasize rhythms. Several tracks feature subdued tones of other instruments such as saxophone, clarinet, flutes, and keyboards, played by members of Antonoff's band, Bleachers.
Contemporary reviews mostly categorized Midnights as synth-pop and electropop. Several reviews described the album as bedroom pop and dream pop. Music critics deemed the album a throwback to the pop sounds of Swift's 1989, Reputation, and Lover, but its atmospheric production makes it relatively subdued and understated. NPR's Ann Powers wrote that the sound "might be called ahistorical chillout music", with a "soft and mutable glow" that stimulated an intimate and isolated atmosphere. According to the popular culture academic Keith Nainby, Midnights has a cool sonic tone: compared to the insistent and urgent beats of 1989 or Reputation, its texture is smoother, with the pitch frequencies "closely matched from top to bottom" that make the instruments' colors blending into a unified palette.
Midnights incorporates influences from R&B, electronica, and hip-hop, showcased through the synthesizers and vocal manipulations—Swift's voice is multitracked and, on "Midnight Rain" and "Labyrinth", pitched down to a low register that critics found masculine or androgynous. Powers wrote that Swift's vocals retained a country-influenced "relaxed" timbre but also interpolated hip-hop cadences that resulted in conversational sing-talking. Elements of electronica are demonstrated on "Snow on the Beach" and "Bejeweled", electro-hip-hop on "Lavender Haze", "Midnight Rain", and "Vigilante Shit", and R&B on "Lavender Haze", "Maroon", "Midnight Rain", "The Great War", and "Glitch". "Midnight Rain" and "Labyrinth" also incorporate dubstep-influenced bass and house-and-trap-inspired beats.
In Vulture, Craig Jenkins dubbed Midnights a "genre reset" attempting to hybridize synth-pop and R&B. Two other Vulture critics—the journalist Charlie Harding and the musicologist Nate Sloan—said the album evoked a variety of dance and club genres, such as techno, UK garage, and jungle. This is demonstrated by the Reese bass, a low-pitched synth-bass sound that is incorporated into tracks such as "Lavender Haze", "Anti-Hero", "Question...?", and "Karma". Harding said the Reese bass gave the album a "dark" and "subterranean" feel. Elise Ryan from the Associated Press and Lucy Harbron from Gigwise considered Midnights an experimental album. Ryan deemed it a move toward indie pop, and Andrew Unterberger from Billboard described it as "alt-leaning synth-pop". Ilana Kaplam of the Alternative Press and Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic said that in addition to the electronic sound, Midnights incorporated alternative elements and contemplative lyricism that evoked Folklore and Evermore.