But Daddy I Love Him: Taylor Swift takes aim at critics with new track

On The Tortured Poets Department’s standout track, But Daddy I Love Him, Taylor Swift claps back at those who criticised her for a former love affair – including some of her fans.

When you’re both the biggest pop star in the world and a talented lyricist known for your intensely personal songs, any new album release becomes not just a musical event – but a chance for millions of strangers to pore over the intricacies of your life.

On Friday morning, Taylor Swift released her new album The Tortured Poets Department (followed two hours later by the surprise release of a second, bonus disc of 15 songs). First announced at the Grammys in February, and coming just 18 months after her last original studio album Midnights (there have also been two re-recordings of her old albums, Speak Now and 1989 in-between) the record was widely expected to be inspired by the demise of her six-year relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn.

If her first true heartbreak album since 2012’s Red is indeed full of emotionally candid and cathartic songs about doomed love affairs – then it was not in the way many expected. On several tracks, Swift seems to be reflecting on an intense but brief relationship with an apparently unsuitable man. Commentaters have taken this person to be Matty Healy, frontman of the band The 1975, who Swift was linked to in 2023