Taylor Swift released her sixth album, Reputation, on November 10. It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Music’s 200 Albums chart and has sold 1.6 million copies so far in the United States alone.

Swift is no longer the innocent country star we all knew and loved. Her new music is characterized as EDM and pop with a slight influence of hip hop in some songs.

She is still singing about her everlasting boy troubles and love interests, but her message has gone from sweet to frivolous. Her new songs are marked with countless alcohol and drug references, as well as descriptions of several sexual activities.

Because of the change, there has been controversy amongst her fans on the quality of the album. Some appreciate the newness and are ready to embrace Swift for who she is. Others are more hesitant to completely abandon their innocent country star-idol.

However, one cannot blame Swift for such a transition. She has not been corrupted; rather, her music is just maturing as she does. Her first album, Taylor Swift, was released in 2006 when she was just sixteen. If she had not matured from 16 to 27, there would be more of an issue.

Her new style of music simply reflects more life experiences which she has gained in these past eleven years. With this new album, she is shedding her old reputation as a small-town, country gal and adopting a new persona.

In Reputation, Swift boldly reclaims her identity as a strong woman, while mourning the loss of her innocence and youth. In many of the songs, including “End Game,” “I Did Something Bad,” and the infamous “Look What You Made Me Do,” she celebrates her past success without apologizing for it.

The last tracks of the new album are very reminiscent of Swift’s musical style in her previous albums 1989 and Red, especially “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” “Call It What You Want,” and “New Year’s Day” with their soft pop qualities.  

As a whole, Reputation focuses more on the lyrics than Swift’s talents. There are no impressive runs, long notes, or high notes. In fact, she barely sings at all in this album, mostly expressing herself with a weird combination of rap and sing-talking, which is almost indescribable. And yet, we can still see growth in her singing and songwriting career. She is starting to master playing with rhythms to affect the mood of her pieces, as Ed Sheeran so seamlessly does in many of his songs and in his feature on Swift’s “End Game.”

However, she seems to rely on the EDM style of music as a crutch. Whenever she diverts from the rhythm and develops her own beat and style, she seems to go back to the stereotypical computer-generated beat that characterizes so many of the other pop songs currently on the radio. This is especially apparent in her song “Dancing With our Hands Tied,” where the switch to the dance music from the softer pop feel for the chorus is abrupt and almost awkward.

She also uses her new album to criticize people who have mistreated her in the past, including Calvin Harris and Tom Hiddleston in “I Did Something Bad” and Kanye West in “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” Harris and Hiddleston were her ex-boyfriends, and West notoriously stole the spotlight from her at an award show in 2009 and took credit for her work in 2016.

Reputation is just a sneak peek of what we are going to start seeing from Swift. 1989 was Swift’s start of a major transition–when she first started realizing that the world was not what she thought. With Reputation, it is clear that Swift has shed her image as a young girl to a strong, independent woman. Swift has proven that she knows what she wants her new reputation to be and will only be improving from here.