"The theme of Taylor Swift’s Lover is right there in the title. These 18 songs are odes to the things she loves most and knows best: her boyfriend and her mom, the West Village and the West End, and, always and forever on a Taylor Swift album, being in love. It’s an exuberant celebration of the challenges of maintaining a relationship through seasons and across continents, of telling the truth and saying sorry. Swift has always mined her personal life for opaque fables of love and retribution; she memorializes a romance’s fleeting details, wraps them in bows, and ferries them to an audience eager to receive her gifts. She writes about a life that’s strengthened, not broken, by heartbreak. Lover is the suggestion that the right person, the right song, might lift heartbreak from your life, too. The concept is, as she claims early on, both “overdramatic and true.”

- Anna Gaca, Pitchfork