Red Review

The album is famously incoherent and the incoherence is the interesting part. She hired Max Martin and Shellback and got We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, which is a great pop record, and 22, which is not. She also kept Nathan Chapman around and made All Too Well, five and a half minutes of accumulated detail that turns a scarf and a refrigerator light into a full account of how a relationship rots.

That song is the reason the album matters and it is still the high point of her catalogue. State of Grace opens with a wall of drums and reaching guitars. The Last Time and Sad Beautiful Tragic are quietly excellent. Treacherous is her best song about wanting something. It sags in places, the Ed Sheeran duet is limp, and the two production styles never reconcile. But the writing takes a leap here and never comes back down, and the mess is the sound of somebody outgrowing a genre in real time.