Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” soars in sales

08 October 2025

A fan looks at copies of the album at the Target release party in Times Square, New York. Photograph: John Taggart/EPA

Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, has arrived with a commercial thunderclap, setting new records and dominating charts but its reception is a portrait of tension between spectacular reach and stuttering creative ambition. Writing in The Guardian, several critics weighed in on what this moment means for Swift’s trajectory, what she got right and wrong, and where she might or should go next.

From a numbers standpoint Showgirl is a blockbuster. Swift bested her own prior first-week sales marks, a milestone now enshrined in the numeric architecture of her career. In the U.S. she surpassed Adele’s record for the highest first-week album sales, and the weekend’s theatrical release event generated roughly $34 million domestically alongside more than $13 million overseas. Yet critical response has been uneven. On Metacritic Showgirl averages around 70 percent approval placing it among Swift’s less critically lauded works.

For some critics, the gulf between sales success and musical fulfillment is stark. Alexis Petridis argues that while the commercial achievements are obvious, the album lacks consistently unforgettable melodies. The lyrical side, he contends, risks slipping into cliché and undermines the album’s broader aims.

Shaad D’Souza echoes this: he accepts the business triumph as inevitable yet questions whether it carries deeper artistic weight. He suggests that no matter how big Swift’s platform is, the creativity must still land. Meanwhile Elle Hunt points to a loss of internal curation, noting that Swift seemed to respond to past criticism she aimed for “pop bangers” after more introspective work but did not always filter the result with sufficient restraint.

The return to collaborators like Max Martin and Shellback underscores another tension: safe bets or reinvigoration? Some critics see it as a step backward for an artist with a catalog of bold turns, returning to older machinery suggests reliance over risk. Others see it as strategic, especially after the tonal pivot exemplified by The Tortured Poets Department. Showgirl leans pop-bright, its sound energetic and shiny, perhaps intended to remind audiences of Swift’s capacity for wide appeal.

Lyrically the album is a flashpoint. Critics referenced lines from Eldest Daughter or Cancelled! as evidence that Swift was sometimes recycling tropes from earlier eras. “We all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire” stands out as a line that, to some, feels more indulgent than inspired. On the balance of songwriting, the consensus is that her strength lies in cohesion, melody, and emotional weight and on Showgirl those elements sometimes waver.

The question then becomes: what next? Some critics suggest she needs a hiatus, a space to step away from expectations and to let her creativity replenish. Folklore and Evermore emerged from pauses and introspection; perhaps Swift needs that again. Others hope she will drop the Easter eggs, the numerology, the self-referential frameworks that have become signature but also constraints if she reclaims narrative freedom she might surprise both critics and fans.

Another route offered is collaboration with younger producers names like Leroy Clampitt or Carter Lang come up whose voices could push Swift into fresh territories. There is also a romantic ideal floated by one critic: that she strip back and take a more unconventional turn, guided by someone like Cass McCombs, to produce an album grounded in immediacy rather than spectacle.

Swift’s brand remains powerful. But critics wonder whether Showgirl is too safe, too engineered, and too entangled in her own lore. The biggest fans still turn every lyric into a theory, but that reflex can turn listener expectations into narrative prison. If Swift’s next chapter allows surprise, space, and renewed risks, it might reassert her enduring musical voice rather than just her commercial dominance.