Terrible Tuesday: 'The Encore' Has the Second-Worst Metacritic Score for a Major Pop Album This Decade

Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, released September 25, now carries a Metacritic score of 43. That isn’t a one-outlet hot take – it’s an aggregate of dozens of reviews, and it lands second-lowest among major pop releases this decade, trailing only Katy Perry’s 143 (35) and sitting below every other top-tier pop album of the 2020s. Pitchfork had already scored the original Showgirl at 5.9, calling it Swift’s lowest mark to date; the four-track “Encore” expansion did nothing to rescue the aggregate, and this column’s own reviews of all four new songs – “Patient Zero,” “Cleveland!,” “Babylon,” and “Pink Clouding,” published two Mondays ago – landed in the same narrow band critics have been describing all along: competent, not more, one real highlight in “Babylon” and three songs coasting on a built-in audience.

That’s the part of this story that’s actually “terrible” by this column’s mandate – not the songs individually, which range from mediocre to genuinely decent, but the size of the gap between what the record is doing commercially and what anyone listening closely thinks of it. The Harvard Crimson’s review, representative of the critical consensus, singled out “Cleveland!” for “sub-par lyrics” that “lack substance,” dinged the Travis Kelce-referencing material across the album for “watered-down language and reused beats,” and reserved its only real praise for “Babylon” – this column’s own highest-scored “Encore” track, for what it’s worth, which suggests the critical and commercial accounting aren’t even disagreeing about which song is strongest. They’re disagreeing about how much that matters. Three of the four “Encore” songs fell completely out of the Hot 100 top 10 one week after debuting there, a collapse this column flagged in this morning’s Mega Monday column; the album itself keeps selling and streaming at a pace that made this week’s Metacritic ranking almost beside the point commercially.

That gap is worth naming plainly rather than treating as a quirky statistic. A 43 Metacritic score is not “critics being mean to a popular artist” noise – it’s dozens of professional listeners, working independently, converging on the same judgment: thin, over-familiar songwriting, a few individual tracks that work, and an overall record that doesn’t reward the attention its chart performance demands people pay it. The commercial engine behind “The Encore” – a fanbase large enough to put four songs in the top five on release week alone – has nothing to do with whether the songs underneath are good, and this is the clearest number yet that they mostly aren’t. A song or an album being successful and a song or an album being good are different claims, argued with different evidence, and this week they point in close to opposite directions.

Hero image: Taylor Swift performing, 2019, by Glenn Francis, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.