Taylor Swift's awful new music exposes her most devastating flaw... that even marriage and billions of dollars can't fix: LINK LAUREN

Newly married, approaching 40 and a billionaire, Taylor Swift has seemingly mastered the universe. What she can't manage is a style that matures beyond the high school cafeteria.

Swift's latest 16-track album The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, released on Friday, features only four new offerings. The rest are recycled from her 12th studio album.

Take the song 'Cleveland!' which opens by cataloguing imagined insults: Swift isn't as attractive as she once was, was never to begin with, isn't a 'girls' girl,' dresses badly despite being rich and can't dance.

'She's not as hot as she was,' she sings.

Later: 'Why's she dressed like trash?'

After all that comes the triumphant rebuttal: 'But my baby likes what he likes.'

Good Lord.

The track 'Pink Clouding' contains the germ of an adult idea – regret over hurting an ex – but it is buried under so many bubblegum chirps and sugary sonics that you can barely make out what Swift is trying to convey.

We get 'Pr-pr-promises', little 'Pink, ha-ha-ha' interjections and 'Met the magenta sunrise / Fuchsia forever intertwined.'

The subject may be grown-up. The packaging isn't.

Swift's new work isn't catastrophically bad, but it's painfully mediocre: polished, expensive, technically competent and almost instantly forgettable.

Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder and famously devoted Swiftie, summed it up gently: 'Overall decent. No smash hits.'

For Swift, 'decent' should not be enough. She has roughly 101 million monthly listeners on Spotify and almost unlimited creative freedom. At this point in the career of a superstar, there ought to be some artistic responsibility, not to please everybody, but to demand more of yourself than something merely serviceable and formulaic.

Fame, it seems, has not just insulated Swift from ordinary life, it has infantilized her.

There is something faintly Baby Jane about the new songs – not because Swift is fading, obviously – but because she seems reluctant to abandon the identity that made her successful: the misunderstood girl, the bad boyfriend, the mean girl, the betrayal, the score-settling.

On 2008's Fearless, Swift dreamed of Romeo and Juliet in 'Love Story' while casting herself as the overlooked girl in 'You Belong With Me.'

'She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers,' she sang.

Well, the girl from the bleachers got the jock. Swift married Travis Kelce, the 6-foot-5 Kansas City Chiefs star.

The fantasy came true. Still, she won't let it go.

Perhaps the problem is: Who, at this point, tells Taylor Swift no?

Even her mediocre albums sell. Her fans will buy the record, the vinyl, the alternate vinyl and the collector's edition.

Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys once called her 'a sort of Mrs Thatcher of pop music' because of her fascination with the economics of the industry. A decade later, the comparison feels even more apt. Her business is formidable. Her art increasingly feels like product.

But Swift's fans have aged too. Many of the girls who heard 'Love Story' in high school are now women with marriages, children, careers, divorces and mortgages. Perhaps they would like Swift to grow up alongside them. I won't hold my breath.

This is frustrating because Swift has greatness in her. 1989 felt like genuine evolution: New York, adulthood, reinvention, an artist shedding one identity and moving confidently into another.

Michael Jackson famously named his home Neverland after Peter Pan's kingdom, where children never grow up, yet even his music evolved dramatically from the Jackson 5 through Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad and Dangerous.

Swift's problem isn't lack of talent. It's, perhaps, a fear of being forgotten.

She has effectively admitted as much. In Miss Americana, she said women in entertainment are 'discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they're 35,' as she argued that female artists must constantly reinvent themselves 'or else you're out of a job.'

That anxiety may explain the relentless output, but it doesn't excuse the puerility.

Take a note from Adele: She disappears, lives, matures and comes back when she has something worth saying. She has written about motherhood, divorce, guilt and the pain of explaining a broken marriage to her son. Her album 30 could not have been made by the woman who recorded 21.

Swift has the opposite problem: oversaturation.

So, here's some advice from a fan: Let us miss you. Leave Neverland and the high-school cafeteria. Then come back with something truly new.