Pretty much every communication or hint of an upcoming move from Taylor Swift comes along with scrutiny, subterfuge, Easter eggs, and a countdown. So it felt nearly impossible when, on Thursday, she emerged from her quarantine with Folklore, an album ready to be delivered in 16 hours. That she was working with Aaron Dessner of the indie-rock band the National and had cowritten a song with Bon Iver felt almost normal in that context. To see her bypass the careful, lengthy promotional campaigns that have accompanied her records for more than a decade was a sign that anything was possible.

So to start with the least surprising thing about Folklore: It’s a heartfelt, enjoyable, and lyrically clever album from the pop star who has been our most consistent source of them. Otherwise it feels like a complete departure from the road she’s paved in the decade since she released her last properly country album, Speak Now, in 2010. It returns to some of her favorite subjects and sounds—with, of course, plenty of mellifluous rhyming couplets and witty asides—yet it contains some of the most surprising music of her career so far.

Though her frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff makes a substantial appearance here, Dessner cowrote or produced 11 of the 16 tracks, and his influence is strong on the shape of the album, especially because several other members of his band show up, including his brother, arranger Bryce Dessner. Swift is a really indelible songwriter and performer, so it’s unexpected to see her subsume her vision into those of other artists like this. On “Exile,” the track Swift cowrote with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, she gives Vernon the first verse, only beginning to sing about 80 seconds in.

In a tweet Dessner explained that the collaboration came about after Swift reached out to him in late April. He sent her a collection of music he had been working on, and a few hours later, she sent him back a finished version of one of those songs. That feeling, of Swift plunging into someone else’s sketch and giving it a gloss, makes the least-obviously-Taylor songs seem transgressive. One of the most remarkable things about Swift has been her ability to retain an auteurist level of control over her own career trajectory in an industry that seems dead set on beating it out of its financially successful artists. In the past that has meant reaching higher planes of commercial and critical success. On Folklore she asserts herself by shaking off some of the strictures that formed while she pursued that independence. (It’s Swift’s second album since she left Big Machine, the independent Nashville label that signed her when she was 15 and built its reputation on her success. When she signed with Republic Records in 2018, she negotiated ownership of the rights to her new music and a high degree of independence.)

Antonoff, on the other hand, works well alongside the influence of another producer. Just a week after the Chicks’ new album, Gaslighter, proved he had really grown as a producer who can fully integrate another strong creative force’s vision, he shows a new level of creativity and restraint on standouts “Mirrorball,” a ’90s-inspired guitar jam, and “August,” the most timeless song he and Swift have worked on together. Antonoff has spent his career elaborating on and mainstreaming some of the innovations of late-2000s indie, so it’s not a surprise that he and Dessner sound so good together. Yet “Betty,” a young-adult-inflected short story, is the only song that Antonoff, Dessner, and Swift all produced together, and what resulted is something you could imagine hearing on country radio.

The delights of Swift’s music have often come from the fact that she herself is such an interesting object of study: her life story, her comings and goings, the references she hides in her songs and her album art. On her eighth album she asserts a new type of creative freedom by releasing a suite of songs that work just as well as their own text. Swift has always understood that people will listen to a wide variety of music and follow you to unexpected places if you just give them a reason, so she stealthily built a career on tucking in strange bedfellows. On Folklore she establishes that, more than any genre or approach, her core identity is really just a well-written song and a desire to keep changing.

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