As the curtain came down on Taylor Swift's Eras tour in Vancouver last December, many fans wondered whether she would pack away her rhinestone jackets and cowboy boots and take a wellearned break.
Her world tour, the highestgrossing of all time, lasted for nearly two years and saw her visit 53 cities - and play 149 shows.
Over the same period, she also released a sprawling double album in last year's The Tortured Poets Department.
But Swift isn't one to rest on her laurels. As she tells us on the title track of her 12th album, a duet with Sabrina Carpenter, she finds the lure of the greasepaint (and the recording studio) hard to resist: 'I'm married to the life of a showgirl, babe, and I'll never know another... I wouldn't have it any other way.'
And so begins her latest Era, with sparkly orange images and an album recorded in Sweden with producers Max Martin and Shellback, during breaks in the European leg of the Eras tour.
The Life Of A Showgirl has been billed as a return to a broadly based pop sound after recent detours into folk and indie-rock, and that's true to an extent. It's a sharp, polished record of 12 hookheavy tunes that clocks in at just under 42 minutes, with Taylor playing a lot of piano and providing her own backing vocals.
But there's nuance and intrigue, too. There are love songs, knowing barbs, and references to Elizabeth Taylor, cancel culture... and Real Madrid. There's also an affectionate nod to George Michael. Any fears that the 35-year-old singer's engagement to American football star Travis Kelce might have blunted her creative edge can be discarded.
She made her name singing relatable songs about unrequited love and untrustworthy bad boys, but she's just as adept at extracting songwriting gold from romantic bliss. It helps, too, that she has plenty of old heartache to fall back on.
Love songs aside, the album taps into the electricity of the Eras show, while also looking at the less savoury side of fame.
It's a topic which Taylor has touched on before, notably on 2024's Clara Bow, named after the silent movie star. The title track here is a story-song about a fading overnight star, 'Kitty', who meets an eager young Swift after a show and warns her of the struggles that lie ahead... advice that she naturally ignores.
She looks to another screen goddess on a track named after Elizabeth Taylor, using the Hollywood legend's life as a metaphor for her own, and illustrating the point with plenty of booming drums and strings.
Producers Martin and Shellback, working with Swift for the first time since 2017's Reputation, burnish these songs with shimmering guitars and gauzy electronics. And if Taylor has reined in her more freewheeling artistic instincts in the quest for greater pop fun, it's a price she's happy to pay.
Fans digging for references to her forthcoming wedding will also find plenty of fodder. 'When I said I didn't believe in marriage, that was a lie,' she sings on plaintive piano ballad Eldest Daughter, the longest song here and one of the best. It's a wonderfully nuanced piece that reiterates her knack of taking a specific event (falling off a trampoline and breaking an arm) to illustrate a wider truth (it pays to be cautious... at least until Mr Right arrives).
Whatever musical style she chooses, her grounding in Nashville's storytelling traditions shines through, and her lyrical touch remains sure.
Elsewhere, she targets an unnamed individual who has crossed her on Father Figure, a song based on George Michael's song of the same name.
'You'll be sleeping with the fishes before you know you're drowning,' she warns, while a hapless ex who refuses to move on gets it in the neck on Actually Romantic: 'It's actually sweet, all the time you spent on me.'
Building on the momentum of the Eras tour, The Life Of A Showgirl finds Swift at the peak of her powers. It even closes with a clip of her thanking fans from the stage. Its success, of course, is a foregone conclusion. A record five million fans have pre-saved it on Spotify and a special vinyl edition, available online, sold out in under an hour.
If the summer months were dominated by Oasis's Live 25 tour, the autumn will surely belong to the eternal showgirl.
