immaculate

After the mess, the mop-up.

That’s one way to understand Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” on which music’s biggest star offers up a dozen precision-cut pop songs just 18 months removed from last year’s sprawling and emotionally unstable “The Tortured Poets Department.”

That earlier LP, which contained 16 tracks before Swift expanded it with 15 more, was perhaps the most divisive of the singer’s two-decade-long career; it racked up bonkers sales and streaming numbers, of course — at this point, she’s truly too big to fail — but its mixed reception among tastemakers and even some fans seemed to rattle Swift, who for all her alertness to the brutality of being a woman in the public eye has become accustomed to a certain level of idolatry.

• Share via Close extra sharing options

So here’s “Showgirl,” her 12th studio LP, for which she stepped away from her longtime creative partner Jack Antonoff to reteam with Max Martin and Shellback, the two hit-making Swedish producer-songwriters who helped her transition cleanly from country to pop in the mid-2010s with blockbuster albums like “Red” and “1989.” Swift has said she made the new album while roaming around Europe in the summer of 2024 on her record-obliterating Eras tour, which explains the title even as it begs all sorts of questions about her psychotic work ethic.

And let’s be clear: These three can craft a hook as neatly and as skillfully — as deviously, really — as anyone in the business. In contrast with the bleary “Tortured Poets,” which yielded only one pop-radio monster in the Hot 100-topping “Fortnight,” “Showgirl” is likely to spin off several, not least the album’s lead single, “The Fate of Ophelia,” which rides an irresistible new wave groove that evokes the veteran hookmeisters of Eurythmics. (Look ’em up, kids.)

As a piece of psychological portraiture, though — the framework, for better or for worse, by which Swift has trained us to interpret her music — this collection of expertly tailored bops falls well short of its predecessor; “Showgirl” feels like a retreat from the vivid bloodletting of “Tortured Poets,” which captured a woman whose one-of-one success had emboldened her to speak certain toxic truths.

Is that because she’s ended up in a healthy romantic relationship with Travis Kelce, the NFL star whom she’s engaged to marry? One hates to indulge hoary ideas about happiness being bad for songwriters. Yet there’s no denying that Swift’s lyrics about love here lack the kind of depth she’s mined in tunes thought to have been inspired by the dastardly likes of John Mayer and Matty Healy.

“Please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot,” she sings, somehow, in the electro-trappy “Wish List,” which recounts all the hoping and dreaming she did before she finally met Mr. Right; “Wood,” a kind of kiddie-disco number that sounds like Martin was aiming it for the “Trolls” movie franchise, exults in the erotic thrill of a guy brandishing “new heights of manhood.” (In case you missed it, I’m sorry to say that’s a reference to Kelce’s podcast, on which Swift recently appeared and dropped a bar about her fiancé — “He may not have read ‘Hamlet,’ but I explained it to him” — that she really should have saved for “The Fate of Ophelia.”)

Elsewhere, she makes familiar complaints about the punishing experience of celebrity, as in “Elizabeth Taylor” — “Oftentimes, it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me” — and “Cancelled!,” which feels like a goth-Nirvana redo of “Look What You Made Me Do,” from 2017’s genuinely startling “Reputation.”

And then there’s the acidic “Actually Romantic,” which seems to be a response to Charli XCX’s “Sympathy Is a Knife,” in which Charli expressed her anxieties about being compared to Taylor in a zero-sum pop scene; Swift gets off some funny lines about chihuahuas and cocaine but totally forgoes the sense of empathy that made her such an icon to every pop songwriter who’s come up behind her.

What’s good on “Showgirl”? “Opalite” is a gorgeous soft-rock tune about overcoming old instincts — “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past / My brother used to call it ‘eating out of the trash’” — while “Ruin the Friendship” looks back at a shoulda-woulda high-school dalliance with the pin-prick precision that Swift has always mustered when writing about her adolescence. Both songs ride coolly laidback Fleetwood Mac-style grooves that feel new for Martin and Shellback, who throughout the album rely more than you’d expect on live instrumentation. (Hang with “Wish List,” if you can, for a killer bass line that shows up in the second verse.)

Swift sings more than once about legacy and inheritance on this album: “Father Figure,” which interpolates George Michael’s late-’80s classic of the same name, is narrated by a mentor who’s betrayed by his protégé; the Broadway-ish title track, which closes the album with a feature from Sabrina Carpenter, tracks the aspirations of a showbiz hopeful from fresh-faced naivete to all-knowing cynicism.

Maybe those songs are Swift’s way of telling us that she knows “The Life of a Showgirl” isn’t as sharp as it could’ve been. We’ll see if it’s as tidy as it needed to be.

No pop artist today has a more tangled relationship to a venue than the Weeknd has with SoFi Stadium.

First, he chose SoCal’s flagship stadium as the site to film the denouement of his cult-campy HBO series “The Idol” during one of his concerts. Unfortunately, during the set, he lost his voice four songs in and had to send fans home for the night so he could recover and make up the date. For such a perfectionist, that must have been a body blow.

He rebounded a few months later with a triumphal return and the concert doc “The Weeknd: Live at SoFi Stadium.” But that nerve-racking experience stuck with him. He revisited it in his recent feature film (and album) “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” where a fictional version of the Weeknd loses his voice onstage, kicking off a surrealist, violent night with Jenna Ortega. A brief interlude from that LP is titled “I Can’t F— Sing.”

So Abel Tesfaye must have had a range of mixed feelings when he walked out at SoFi on Wednesday night, the first of four nights at the site of some of his greatest triumphs and most bitter disappointments as a live performer. “This is bigger than me — it’s a reflection of the power of music and its impact on people,” Tesfaye told The Times in a brief email just before the show.

The Weeknd performs during his After Hours til Dawn Stadium Tour at SoFi Stadium.

(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)

This slickly cryptic, immaculately performed 2½-hour set covered the whole of his era-defining catalog. But is this run of SoFi dates a swan song to one of the most successful recording projects of our time?

Since first emerging as an anonymous voice atop gothic, coked-up R&B productions on a trilogy of 2011 mixtapes, Tesfaye’s tastes and his unlikely commercial success grew together.

An underground fan base turned up for the nihilism of “Wicked Games” (“Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain”). But with assists from Max Martin and Daft Punk, he became a bona fide pop star. His mournful Ethiopian melodic lilt stood out like nothing else in Top 40, and he hung onto enough art-freak sensibility that he could headline the Super Bowl halftime show with dancers in full-face plastic-surgery bandages. His ’80s-noir, 2019 single “Blinding Lights” remains the most-streamed song on Spotify, ever.

Darryl Eaton, his agent at CAA, told The Times that the 200,000 tickets sold for this SoFi run alone is “like selling out an entire American city.”

Yet Tesfaye has recently hinted at retiring the Weeknd as a premise. “It’s a headspace I’ve gotta get into that I just don’t have any more desire for,” he told Variety recently. “It never ends until you end it.”

Whether he wants to release less conceptual, more personal music, or if he’s simply run out of gas with this all-consuming pop entity he’s created, this SoFi run is likely one of the last chances L.A. fans will get to see the Weeknd. Tesfaye will surely keep making music and films, but it makes cinematic sense that he’d come back to the scene of his most painful night onstage to put this all to bed.

After a brief and typically roiling set from Tesfaye’s recent collaborator Playboi Carti, Tesfaye emerged in black and gold, eyes lit with LED pinpicks, over a ruined cityscape. Opening with the “BoJack Horseman”-riffing “The Abyss,” he grimly promised, “I tried my best to not let you go / I don’t like the view from halfway down … I tried to be something that I’ll never be.” It sure felt like he was saying goodbye to this way of being an artist.

The show kicked into gear with Tesfaye surrounded by a trim live band and minimalist, moving-sculpture dancers in rose-colored robes. He didn’t need much more to let that once-in-a-generation voice carry everything. Tesfaye’s a uniquely dedicated live vocalist on the stadium circuit (it’s kind of honorable that any serious vocal troubles might mean the show’s over). For all his high-concept misdirections in videos and films, you could feel the troubled intimacy that’s kept fans invested in this music over so many aesthetics.

For all his close reads of Michael Jackson’s records on singles like “Can’t Feel My Face,” Tesfaye’s not an especially physical dancer onstage. But he knows exactly how to inhabit and set-dress this music to make it eerie and monolithic, even at its poppiest.

The Weeknd.

(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)

“After Hours” made a seductive case for letting an obviously toxic man back into your life (“Different girls on the floor, distracting my thoughts of you”). After finally taking off his face mask, he played “Take My Breath” like a revving, neo-disco floor-filler that still winked at the darker choke-kinks of his old music.

When he cranked up the pyro on the midcareer lurker ballad “The Hills,” the front rows of SoFi got a bracing reminder of how volatile this music is even when it sits atop streaming charts. Alongside Carti on their collaborations “Timeless” and “Rather Lie,” Tesfaye grounded his pal’s smeary Atlanta noise with evilly pretty melody. This is a voice you just can’t help but believe, even when it’s calling you to self-destruction.

The Weeknd performs at SoFi Stadium.

(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)

If this tour is indeed at the end of his tenure as the Weeknd, at more than three dozen songs, Wednesday’s set delivered every possible angle of valediction — the thrumming decadence of “Often,” the desperate sincerity of “Die for You” and “Is There Someone Else?” Newer material like “Cry for Me” and “São Paolo” showed that, whatever his exhaustion with this aegis, he’s got tons of startling ideas still brimming.

When Tesfaye buried the hatchet with the Grammys back in February, it was a generous gesture to an organization that inexplicably locked him out of honors for “Blinding Lights,” which he should, obviously, have contended for. When he played that double-time, neo-New Wave single toward the end of his Wednesday set, it felt like a strange pearl that he’d discovered — one of the biggest pop songs of all time, played by a guy whose music emerged from a murk of MDMA licks and mournful threesomes.

With perhaps the exception of his (exceedingly stylish if critically skeptical) film career, he’s always found his voice, over and over again. SoFi Stadium has dealt the Weeknd his greatest defeat and some of his finest hours as a performer. Now it’s sending him off to Valhalla, wherever that takes Abel Tesfaye.