It’s one of several songs with a cheaply effective patriarchal bogeyman in its sights: On the budget-Berghain “69,” Taylor lists all the sex positions she’s into but forewarns any prospective lover: “But the one thing I hate/’Cos I just can’t concentrate/No, I just can’t abide/Yeah, I’ve never the time to 69.” Intended as a comment on how women don’t put themselves first in bed, it comes off like a tee-hee watershed comedy sketch about doing it, or an unwanted reminder of Lily Allen’s Sheezus. The dehumanized thrash of “Lies” completes the trifecta, drums roiling like whitewater as she admits how often she hides her true feelings to keep the peace. “I’ll make you fuckin’ hear me,” she rages. But she’s only putting a blunt focus on what, by now, are long-accepted understandings of gender dynamics; it’s a far cry from how much she could contain in a single line like “sexting you at the mental health talk feels counterproductive” on Prioritise Pleasure. Surely we’re too far gone for “women deserve orgasms” to still count as a trenchant political statement.
She contrasts the high dudgeon with pat anthemics. Taylor has cited Elbow’s rapturous “One Day Like This” as an inspiration to write songs that spread their arms wide, primed to soundtrack victorious TV sports montages. Heavy with choir and endless saccharine crescendos, the album ups the stagey energy that worked sparingly on her last record (She also debuted it with a one-off theatrical residency in London, and A Complicated Woman feels like it was produced spectacle-first). “Focus Is Power” grows warm and sentimental as Taylor recalls being told, “‘Don’t be too loud or too quiet’/But I got all this fire.” “Whatever is right for you will guide you through,” she sings on “If Not Now, It’s Soon,” which is pure M People. “Time is a chance to heal” goes “What Now,” as the choir roars and the Etsy checkout goes cha-ching.
Some listeners will feel moved, and may they take everything they can from this. Others may despair at the state of putatively feminist inspo-culture in the age of celebrity all-women space crews reminding girls that they too could one day “put the ass in astronaut.” At the stage show premiering the album, Taylor and her dancers dressed in pilgrim-style outfits that many critics compared to the capes of The Handmaid’s Tale; their movements transform from stiff and “shackled,” Taylor said, “then we exorcise it. Over the course of the show, it all unravels and everyone ends up being themselves instead of conforming to these societal norms.” But “be yourself” culture is, arguably, the defining societal norm of our times, one used to justify a lot of individualism at the expense of actual society. No one album or musician should be burdened with solving systemic injustice, but A Complicated Woman yearns to make A Big Feminist Statement. Down to Moonchild Sanelly giving a very Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie-in-“Flawless” address amid the softly rushing Afrobeats of “In Plain Sight,” it’s one whose myopic focus is stuck in 2013—girls, you got this; men, do better—detached from the fairly pressing feminist concerns of 2025.
Self Esteem broke out as an act of defiant self-definition, but A Complicated Woman’s wide-reaching, mollifying remit feels like Taylor trying to be too much to too many people, to live up to the validation that her last album occasioned. Its best moments are the most personal: singing about her relationship with alcohol on “The Curse,” which builds to a furious, yelled chorus of “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t fucking work” that rings extremely true; “Logic, Bitch!” is a vulnerable, generous tribute to Taylor’s ex-girlfriend and how they “let the love evolve/Let it change and grow.” These two songs say more about what traps and frees women than any of the boilerplate rhetoric elsewhere. Ironically, so does the way A Complicated Woman tries to make a case for a woman’s multifacetedness but winds up so boxed in by expectation.
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