Some weeks ago Taylor Swift released an edition of the album Midnights which, amidst demonstrating her slickest of capitalist capabilities—a form of the physical bit with an exclusive song which could only find its way into fingers at an East Rutherford show! a remix with Ice Spice to mutually benefit both their TikTok numbers, in the guise of “she’s the one to watch”! a patent and cynical nod to said internet interloping in the title “More Lana Del Rey”!—has a phenomenal banger called “Hits Different.”
She’s introducing, or reconceptualizing, an idea into the streaming landscape: that a project can (even should) have several lives. No longer is an album a discrete cut and dry moment. While we’ve seen this elsewhere—boy bands and K-pop groups creating multipart sagas, or growing reveals in singles with half the upcoming album in their depths—it also meshes well with her overall songwriting craft and ethos of “cryptic Machiavellian" rabbit holes and hidden gems, as well as with the protracted concept of Midnights itself (some wordy and effervescent songs seeming to carbon-date as far back as Speak Now). Here is an album which can unfold over and over again.
Here is an album in which the best tracks are kept for deluxe packages. (Might I be tinted and subjective?) “Dear Reader”, off the second iteration, both closes that version excellently and sits right next to “Hits Different” once revealed as no longer the final word. Ironically, then, “Hits Different”, the first fresh delivery post-Alwyn, is about a split that leaves you throwing up on the street when you think about your paramour with their next. With a track list that grows closer to filling the lefthand column of the album’s design—plus a new color scheme—there’s the increasing visual suggestion that Midnights could have a fourth and final symmetrical release, its innards treading the line between past and future just as the title nods to.
More than the strategy of things—don’t you feel like you’ve heard this beat and early guitar melody before in snatches of Fearless or 1989?—I’m invested in “Hits Different” for its goop. To make a perfect pop song for a breakup is somehow precisely conducive to beautiful bounty.