The Tortured Poets Department Review

The best songs are among her strongest. Guilty as Sin? is a superb piece of writing about wanting something you have decided not to have. The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived is genuinely vicious and the only track that gets its hands dirty. Loml is a real ballad. But thirty one tracks at one volume, produced almost entirely by Antonoff and Dessner in the same hushed palette used on the last three albums, is an endurance test rather than an experience.

The writing tips into overstatement more often than she has ever allowed, with imagery about tattooed golden retrievers and asylums that reads as a first draft, and several songs restate what the previous one said. There is also a defensiveness running through it that curdles: the record wants sympathy and keeps naming the people withholding it. Somewhere inside is a fierce and painful forty minute album. Nobody was willing to go and find it.