Swift's feat signals more than the intense devotion of her audience. It's also an indication that the thoughtful, rootsy Folklore is leading many listeners to consume it in an old-fashioned way: by letting the album play from beginning to end, each of its 16 tracks building on the one before.

And yet. Like any great LP, Folklore - which Swift made remotely with a crew of fresh collaborators including Aaron Dessner of the National and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon - has its peaks and valleys. Here, then, is a critical rundown of every song on Folklore, ranked from worst to best.

Here you can hear the album's opener doing some of the work that an advance single might've done to guide listeners into Swift's latest era. Though this track feels less emotionally daring than any to come, its indie-folk textures effectively reframe her voice.

Another Swift hallmark that Folklore carries through is the contemplative slow-mo closer, represented here by this pretty if somewhat blah meditation on a painful belief in somebody's "faithless love".

It can all start to feel a bit same-same towards the end, as in this dreamy-dreary jam. Intriguing lyric, though, that seems to take in the horror of COVID-19 (or perhaps her mom's experience with cancer): "Something med school did not cover / Someone's daughter, someone's mother / Holds your hand through plastic now / Doc, I think she's crashing out."

Swift has channeled Lana Del Rey at least once on each of her albums since 1989, and here it happens in the woozy first part of a three-song suite about a teenage love triangle.

More delightfully unexpected language from America's one-time sweetheart, who asks the person witch-hunting the title character what they see when they envision her face: "Does she smile? / Or does she mouth, 'F--k you forever'?"

This icy arena-goth number - one of several tracks co-written by Swift's old pal Jack Antonoff - is narrated from beyond the grave, as a dead woman addresses the tormentors she "didn't want to have to haunt".

Here you can detect Prince's influence in a prayerlike ode with funky bass and a complicated vocal melody. "You know that I'd swing with you for the fences / Sit with you in the trenches," she pants, "Give you my wild, give you a child." Whew.

Swift seems off her metaphor game in the ungainly Cardigan, but she's utterly on point in this mournful orchestral-pop dirge: "You're a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town," she sings - as sharp a rendering of regret as any we've heard from her.

Part 2 of the love-triangle trilogy sets a story about cheating against the LP's lushest arrangement: a gorgeous weave of strings and horns and guitars that demonstrates the depth of Swift's writerly empathy on Folklore.

Indeed, in the trilogy's final chapter, she tries, amid Harvest-style harmonica and pedal steel, to get into the head of the teenage boy two-timing Swift's obvious stand-in. "I'm only 17, I don't know anything," she has him begging her - an excuse she sounds (almost) willing to accept.

This song is a moving exploration of how - and why - people betray those they love. Singing tenderly over hushed acoustic guitar, Swift traces an affair from thrilling rendezvous in "beautiful rooms" to tawdry "meetings in parking lots".

More narrative experimentation as Swift moves skillfully between two distinct points of view: that of a young girl who thinks her best friend lives in a haunted house and that of a woman who now understands why her friend was afraid to go home.

A dramatic, slowly building duet with Vernon, Exile depicts a couple still combing through the wreckage of a long-broken relationship. "You never gave a warning sign," he complains; "I gave so many signs," she responds, and the way their voices overlap, you know they're both right.

Folklore's drollest song is also its most impressive bit of storytelling: a detailed portrait of the real-life woman who owned Swift's Rhode Island mansion - and evidently scandalised the town's gentry - decades before the singer did.

Swift has said that one of her goals with Folklore was to write about people other than herself. But here she appears to turn back to her life for a very cleverly phrased account of the twists and turns that led her to meet her boyfriend, British actor Joe Alwyn. Great vocal too, by turns whimsical and luscious.

As much as Folklore borrows from beardo indie rock, the singer is also tapping into the proudly feminine realm of acts like the Sundays and Sixpence None the Richer. As Antonoff's guitars glimmer and twang around her, Swift looks for an escape from 2020's turmoil and finds one in a romantic fantasy so vivid it hurts.