Heyy, I am back!!!!! So is Taylor Swift!!! Almost a year ago, Taylor Swift released Lover, a lively course correction intended, in part, to craft a more measured and mature style for the singer, whose previous album, Reputation, had used withering sarcasm and hip-hop production elements to wage war with Swift’s crumbling, goodie-two-shoes image and the enemies poking holes in the narrative. In January’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana, which chronicled the Lover sessions and revisited key career moves in the preceding decade, Swift admitted to being driven, on a certain level, by a hunger for public approval: “My entire moral code is a need to be thought of as good,” she said. 1989’s pop turn was really a quest to be seen as the total package in music, an overcorrection for the embarrassment at the 2009 MTV VMAs. The country era before that had been a bit of an act of folksy people-pleasing, too. Lover, it seemed, was the real deal. But even that was a charm offensive of a sort, heralded by blindingly bright music videos and bustling, busy melodies. Amid the R&B/soul underpinnings of “False God” and “I Forgot That You Existed,” the droning synths of “The Archer,” the high school melodrama of “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” the maximalist pop radio fare of “Me!” and “You Need to Calm Down,” and the rustic repose of “Soon You’ll Get Better” and the title track, half a dozen possible Taylors emerged from the pyre on which the old Taylor burned. Again, Swift created distance between her past and present by arming herself with different toys. You could argue that the singer’s eighth album folklore, announced and released in a whirlwind 24 hours just before the weekend, is another sweeping recalibration, trading soaring melodies and effervescent production for moody, introspective folk-pop. But it undersells the true utility of this stripped affair to say it’s just a new sandbox for Taylor. What’s striking about this collection of songs is the relative lack of a fussy new sound and an obvious single. Loosed from the responsibility of piquing the audience’s interest with a rollout dotted with attention-grabbing gestures, Swift is left with just her feelings and her stories.

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