Sometimes it works; often it doesn’t. Swift reunited with the Swedish producer Max Martin and his protégé Shellback, the same long-haired studio savants responsible for co-creating some of her most iconic singles. More recently, Swift has been working with the indie-leaning producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, though by her 2024 release, “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology”—a wearying double album of savage, embittered breakup songs—it felt as though those relationships had ebbed, creatively. Martin, who is fifty-four, is the most commercially successful songwriter of the twenty-first century; his work is meticulous and precise, and his songs are taut, balanced, unyielding. (Part of the odd pleasure of his writing, which abides by some kind of inscrutable mathematics, is its strictness.) Martin is an interesting foil for Swift, who is so hyper-focussed on narrative and phrasing that she has now self-styled as something of an angsty comp-lit major. (“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” she wrote when announcing her engagement.) Martin, whose first language is Swedish, is chiefly concerned with melody. He writes lyrics phonetically (he has brought up the punchiness of ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” as a kind of beacon)—a practice that can result in hilariously off-kilter grammar. (On the pre-chorus of Ariana Grande’s “Break Free,” Grande exultantly sings, “Now that I’ve become who I really are!” Swift, of course, would never.)journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter