1989

On her new album, Taylor Swift goes full-throttle pop

“Took our broken hearts and put them in a drawer,” Taylor Swift sings on “Welcome to New York,” the opening track on her fifth and sharpest album, 1989. Coming from Swift, a superstar who built a global empire penning hits about matters of the heart, this sounds like a threat–stowing her sorrow away after it brought so much success seems borderline irresponsible.

But Swift has gambled before and won. After writing every song solo on her blockbuster 2010 country-crossover album, Speak Now, she teamed up with a varied roster of top-shelf tunesmiths for 2012′s sprawling, genre-spanning opus, Red. That album went quadruple platinum, earned rapt critical acclaim and four Grammy nods and made her an icon.

On 1989, out Oct. 27, she sounds like one. Leaner and keener than those on Red, her new songs fizz and crackle with electricity and self-aware wit. Driven by synths and drums in lieu of guitars, all trace of country abandoned, 1989 holds together sonically as a tribute to the electro-pop that dominated radio 25 years ago. Swift executive-produced the album alongside Swedish hit machine Max Martin, who lends pop shellack to her nimble lyrics. Winding choruses have been whittled down to their stickiest essence.

Thematically, too, Swift breaks with the past, skirting victimhood and takedowns of maddening exes, critics and romantic competitors. Instead, there’s a newfound levity. Not only is Swift in on the joke; she also relishes it. The bouncy “Blank Space” hyperbolizes her portrayal in the media as an overly attached man-eater who dates for songwriting material: “Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane/ But I’ve got a blank space,” she coos before, incredibly, a clicking sound like that of a pen, “and I’ll write your name.” The skronky, horn-driven lead single “Shake It Off” communicates a cheerful disinterest in being critiqued, and a panicked, operatic vocal sample of Swift singing the word “Stay!” gives the swerving “All You Had to Do Was Stay” an oddball kick. The angriest song here is “Bad Blood,” a chanting call to arms over a dispute with a frenemy, and even it feels tongue-in-cheek.

Instead of pain, the songs about romance vibrate with fluttering lust or wistful nostalgia. The winking disco anthem “Style” packs a nasty ’70s groove, while strings and a lush refrain lend “Wildest Dreams” a cinematic grandeur: “He’s so tall, and handsome as hell,” she exhales. Surging drums and a jagged bassline, courtesy of fun. rocker Jack Antonoff, mitigate the longing of “I Wish You Would.” Even the atmospheric electro-ballad “This Love” is more hopeful than anguished, enlivened by a catchy chorus and Swift’s breathless delivery.

Though Swift is skilled with melody, her deadliest weapon is a superhuman knack for tight, evocative images–a skill she employs sparingly here. On the tense “Out of the Woods,” she ruefully recounts deciding “to move the furniture so we could dance,” while the feathery “Clean,” a collaboration with English composer Imogen Heap, sees her comparing a relationship to “a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore.” But the most potent statements are sonic, like “I Know Places,” a thrillingly paranoid cut with a drum-and-bass-like intensity. It’s the album’s darkest moment, until the chorus fills the song with light.

As long as Swift writes autobiographically, her romantic affairs will be the subject of speculation, but it’s the expertly crafted sound of 1989 that marks her most impressive sleight of hand yet–shifting the focus away from her past and onto her music, which is as smart and confident as it’s ever been. Who are these songs about? When they sound this good, who cares?

The pop star, who'd long been quiet on gay issues, comes up with a subtle new way to pay homage

Correction appended: Oct. 21, 2014

For pop stars in the last several years, paying homage to gay fans has become something of a tradition. As society at large has grown more and more attuned to gay civil rights, Top 40 radio has followed suit; it helps that gay men are a particularly large and vocal segment of the pop-music audience. Now, Taylor Swift has become the latest to join a swelling chorus with a pleasantly low-key shout-out in her new song that steers clear of theatrics in favor of simple emotion.

In the first track on her new album 1989, entitled “Welcome to New York,” Swift sets up New York, her current home, as a place of unparalleled freedom, including for gay people: “You can want who you want,” she sings, “Boys and boys and girls and girls.” A full-throated cry for marriage equality or an end to bullying it isn’t. But its simple declarativeness fits the tenor of the times.

The pop stars who’ve come before Swift have been far more theatrical in their equal-rights activism. Lady Gaga has made advocacy a cornerstone of her career, from her single “Born This Way,” with its support for “lesbian, transgender life,” to her claims that the 2010 Video Music Awards “meat dress” was an anti-Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell statement. Songs as vague in their uplifting lyrics as “Firework,” by Katy Perry, and “We R Who We R,” by Kesha, were widely read as having particular meaning for gay youth. And one could argue they’re all aping Madonna, who’s built a career out of engaging with and speaking directly to the sort of gay club audiences who already knew what voguing was before “Vogue” came out.

But times have changed rapidly: “Born This Way” came out in 2011, and “Firework” and “We R Who We R” in 2010. Though the gay community has much still to overcome, the issue of equality no longer seems like one that requires song-length shout-outs. Instead, we get songs like “Welcome to New York,” which tells listeners that whomever they love, they’re okay — not fabulous, or glamorous, or a firework, but well on their way to figuring life out. It shares an approach with the similarly approachable country song “Follow Your Arrow,” by Kacey Musgraves, which encourages listeners to use marijuana if they want, get married (or not) if they want, and date members of the same gender if they want. It’s appealingly low-drama.

We’ve moved past the point, in music, where sexuality is a solely defining trait. While songs like “Born This Way” and approaches like Britney Spears declaring “I love all my gay boys” make music listening into a statement of identity politics, “Welcome to New York” takes a subtler tack. It, and “Follow Your Arrow,” tell listeners to be proactive in finding happiness, while in “Born This Way,” “Firework,” and “We R Who We R,” being oneself was an automatic ticket to liberation. In “Welcome to New York,” discovering one’s sexuality is a part of finding happiness — but only a part.

To this point, Swift has been something of a rarity: A pop star who’s remained largely silent on gay issues and her gay fans. In her defense, Swift has, until now, been balancing a pop career and a country one. She’s had to keep one foot in a genre that’s all about gay fans and the other in a genre that’s largely silent on the topic. But, having declared her new album her first official pop record, Swift seems empowered to craft a more nuanced sort of pro-gay message. There’s all kinds of self-confidence, evidently, that one can draw from living in New York.

The original version of this story misstated the release year of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” It was 2011.

Read next: Taylor Swift’s ‘Welcome to New York’ Is the Musical Equivalent of a Peppermint Latte

The 1980s dance party arrived early

From Russia with love: the previously teased Taylor Swift song “Welcome to New York” was supposed to arrive in full on iTunes at midnight Tuesday, but thanks to time zones, as one astute Tumblr user pointed out, midnight came a little early overseas — and so did the song.

Swift says she named her album 1989 after the year of her birth because she was inspired by the decade’s pop music sounds. It showed on the Jack Antonoff collaboration “Out of the Woods,” but it’s even more obvious on “Welcome to New York,” which finds T-Swift dusting off cheesy synthesizers and a retro drum-machine beat as she sings of self-reinventing in the city that never sleeps. The lyrics are about as earnest as any fresh-off-the-bus New York transplant, but the song’s got enough pep to warm the frigid Grinch heart of at least one jaded New Yorker this season as they trek through snow and trash in search of a peppermint latte.

More importantly, “Welcome to New York” is the first 1989 track we’ve heard that features Swift doing something other than repeating the words of the title over and over again in the chorus.

Listen to the track here. 1989 comes out Oct. 27.

Featuring a new 1989 song

The Bleachers mastermind talked to TIME earlier this year about collaborating with the "Out of the Woods" singer

Last night Taylor Swift premiered her new song “Out of the Woods” from her upcoming album, 1989. Unlike the bouncy, horn-blasting “Shake It Off,” the new track shows off the ’80s pop influences Swift has said inspired the record (and its title). That’s in part because she wrote the song with Jack Antonoff of fun., whose first solo album as Bleachers this year was a crash course in how to mine the best of ’80s synth pop while still sounding fresh for 2014.

Before Bleachers’ Strange Desire came out this summer, TIME spent a day with Antonoff at Coney Island, where he talked about collaborating with Swift. “You can look at someone and get to know their music and say, ‘This is someone who I want to work with,’” said Antonoff, who also called “Out of the Woods” “one of the most important things I’ve ever been a part of” on Twitter last month. “It’s not rocket science if someone seems cool or great.” (Antonoff’s girlfriend, Girls creator Lena Dunham, also became pals with Swift after Dunham asked to be friends in a direct Twitter message following some mutual admiration.)

Antonoff says he always wanted to write with other artists, but didn’t get a chance to do so until “We Are Young” and “Some Nights” took off and opened some doors. After participating in some impersonal writing camps for artists such as Rihanna, Antonoff swore off sessions where he couldn’t work face-to-face with the artist. “I don’t want to imagine what someone would want to do — I want to collaborate,” Antonoff told TIME. “That’s why I like working with Taylor or Sara Bareilles or Tegan and Sara — where you’re just in the room, talking about what stuff is going to feel like and sound like, and working from that perspective. It’s not any of this bullshit of, ‘Let’s write a hit Katy Perry song.’”

It's out with the guitars and in with the drums on the singer's new 1989 track

Taylor Swift rang in her most recent album era with “Shake It Off,” a cheerfully flip pop confection that reads as an act of defiance to everyone from the haters to country-radio programmers. For “Out of the Woods,” the second offering from her upcoming LP 1989 (out Oct. 27), Swift’s rebellion takes a slyer shape, and a darker one.

Swift wrote the song with fun.’s Jack Antonoff, and the sounds of his ’80s-inspired solo project Bleachers reverberate here: a distorted vocal sample, crunchy drums, echoing harmonies. Lyrically, though, it’s still classic Swift, capturing the anxiety of a volatile romance with poignant little details — there are paper airplanes flying, and Swift and her would-be-beau have to move the furniture so they can dance; and, of course, there’s that much-discussed bridge about an accident that landed the unlucky couple in the hospital.

But it’s the furious chant of that anthemic chorus, all breathless urgency, and the left-of-center production that help Swift perform the niftiest sleight of hand: Even with lyrics that include some of her most headline-grabbing autobiographical admissions to date, the most interesting thing here isn’t who it’s about, but rather, how different it sounds.

Listen here.

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