"Midnights is about reflection, not reinvention. Taylor Swift has explained that at length, in her own flowery vernacular: These 13 songs are “a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.” The thoughts that keep the 32-year-old songwriter up late are the ones she’s spent nine albums excavating: the unpredictable rise and devastating fall of romance; the binary of the “good girl” and the “bad girl,” and the chafing of societal expectation (that “1950s shit”); and the uncomfortable acceptance of her own fallibility. Life, she declares, “is emotionally abusive.”

 - Quin Moreland, Pitchfork