Taylor Swift Just Dropped ‘Life of a Showgirl,’ And Here Are The Memes The Internet Shared In Response

A year after The Tortured Poets Department^[1] turned into a two-and-a-half-hour exercise in bonus tracks, pop star Taylor Swift ^[2] has returned with her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl^[3].

Predictably, the internet rapidly split into two camps, where half the timeline began hailing the album as her sharpest work yet, and the other half calling it a gaudy stumble.

What’s certain is that any record that contains the lines, “every joke’s just trolling ^[4] and memes ^[5]” deserves a thorough meme analysis. Here’s ours.

What’s Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ about?

Taylor Swift wrote most of her 12th album during the tail end of the Eras Tour ^[6], dialing down the 31-track melodrama of The Tortured Poets Department^[7] into a compact 12-track set.

For production, she parted ways with regular collaborator Jack Antonoff and reunited with pop-studio heavyweights Max Martin and Shellback, who had previously worked on Swift’s albums Red, 1989 and Reputation.

Swift announced the album on her fiancé Travis Kelce’s ^[8] sports podcast New Heights on August 12th, 2025, breaking YouTube records and gathering over 11 million views in just two days.

In the days leading up to the album release in early October, it seemed like the roll-out for the album was engineered to break everything, thanks to a record-setting presave campaign and a same-day theatrical release featuring lyric videos and behind-the-scenes footage in cinemas worldwide.

How Was ‘Life of a Showgirl’ Received By Critics?

Critics were largely split on whether Taylor Swift had done it again or if the album was a creative misfire.

Rolling Stone celebrated the record ^[9] with a five-star take, praising Swift for “hitting all her marks” and for the album’s tidy, incisive storytelling. Variety’s chief music critic ^[10] called it “contagiously joyful,” arguing that even Swift’s score-settling detours sound “sunny.”

Pitchfork’s Walden Green ^[11] landed the opposite verdict on at least one track, calling “Actually Romantic” a cringey, sour misstep, arguing that Swift’s “songwriting machine is spite, and it’s getting pretty rusty.” The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis ^[12] gave the album two stars, calling it “dull razzle-dazzle” and suggesting the songs lack the hooks Swift used to land.

What’s With All The Discourse Around ‘Actually Romantic’?

Lyrics to the track “Actually Romantic” leaked on Twitter / X just days before the release of the album, and appeared to confirm Stan chatter about Swift “clapping back” to Charli xcx’s track “Sympathy is a knife,” in which the British singer mulled over her complicated feelings of insecurity and resentment against a more popular popstar.

“Actually Romantic” featured lines like, “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave” and “Like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse / That’s how much it hurts,” and set off a fan war between the two pop stars’ supporters.

X users like @machzazerov defended Charli and framed the lyrics as a disproportionate attack, while others like @athenamount shrugged, saying that the lyrics’ obliqueness meant whatever the listener wanted it to mean.

What’s Up With The Memes About ‘Eldest Daughter’ and ‘Wood’?

Taylor Swift has a tendency to write lines that practically begged for reaction, and the tracks “Eldest Daughter” and “Wood” certainly garnered some strong ones.

On October 3rd, X user @GraceSpelman posted a clip reacting to the opening lines of “Eldest Daughter,” “Everybody’s so punk on the internet / Everyone’s unbothered ’til they’re not / Every joke’s just trolling and memes.”

The song may be the track that gathered the most polarising responses online, with some people begging Swift to never use the words “trolling,” “memes” and “comments” in a song ever again.

lol https://t.co/a78pUaSvCU pic.twitter.com/quyrERr07R ^[13]^[14]

— grace spelman (@GraceSpelman) October 3, 2025 ^[15]

Other internet users winced at Swift’s attempt at writing about more lascivious topics, with one internet user citing the lyrics “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see, his love was the key, that opened my thighs,” and pointing to an older tweet that almost word-for-word prophesied Swift’s “woody” analogy.