It Seems Like Everyone Hates Taylor Swift’s New Songs, So Why Are They Still So Popular?

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Can I confess something that might make me instantly suspect as a music critic? I really don’t mind Taylor Swift’s “Wood.” I actually … kinda like it.

The most maligned album cut from Swift’s fall 2025 blockbuster The Life of a Showgirl, “Wood” is very obviously about her then-fiancé, now-husband Travis Kelce, more specifically his, uh, manhood. Given its lyrics about how “his love was the key that opened my thighs,” critics were quick to pounce on “Wood” as the low point of Showgirl, the epitome of ick. Slate’s own Carl Wilson called it “the cringiest,” and Katherine St. Asaph, writing for the Singles Jukebox, regards “Wood” as the low point of Swift’s whole career, the “floor for her musical output.” But … it must be said the song is also a banger, a Motown-slash-disco homage teeming with musical allusions to everything from the Jackson 5’s superlative “I Want You Back” to Amii Stewart’s electro version of “Knock on Wood” to Naughty by Nature’s breezy hand-waver “Jamboree.” I don’t know about you, but after decades of ingesting pop hits with groan-worthy, squicky, and unquestionably racy lyrics, when I encounter “Wood” in the wild I mostly let the lyrics sail over my head and just tap my foot.

Why do I bring up “Wood,” which wasn’t even an officially promoted single from The Life of a Showgirl? Because despite all the carping, it was kind of a hit anyway. It peaked at No. 5 in its opening week—higher than seven other songs from the LP, including the Sabrina Carpenter duet—and wound up spending about two months on the Hot 100. I remain convinced it could’ve caught on for real if promoted to radio. (Who knows—maybe one day, like “Cruel Summer,” it will be.) Given the reality distortion field that is Taylor Swift’s career, basically anything she releases these days is going to have a shot at No. 1: moody therapy sessions, a quirky Shakespeare metaphor, a modern girl-group homage, a soundtrack song about Jessie and Woody. Why not a song about her hubby’s woody? Ultimately, it’s the pop hooks that make a hit.

In short, the critics and the more cynical factions of the Swiftie army may have strong opinions about her output these days, but the marketplace keeps saying we aren’t done with Taylor. As if proving my point, Swift has another earworm at No. 1 right now that the commentariat loves to hate. One year after The Life of a Showgirl and its singles crash-landed on the charts, she returns with a batch of bonus tracks, branded as a Showgirl addendum and cowritten and produced by her 1989 and Showgirl brain trust of Max Martin and Shellback. And the first of those tracks shot to No. 1, even though the whole project has been widely panned, or at least widely meh’d. Like “Wood,” the lyrics of its leadoff track have taken a beating among critics and the very online. (The title, deservedly.) And yet, I must confess I find the song quite infectious. It not only evicted Ella Langley’s record-breaking “Choosin’ Texas” from the penthouse, it’s held there for a fortnight and counting. Not bad for a song that detractors keep claiming is a “Zero.”

I don’t expect “Patient Zero” to make many Swifties’ all-time top 10 lists, unless they’ve experienced a very specific kind of breakup. As a composition, it’s too slight, melodramatic and burdened with an ill-conceived metaphor of a title. In the lyrics, Swift’s protagonist is the titular first victim of a toxic boyfriend, long since dispatched, and is now advising and comforting the woman he dated after her: “But if you’re sick of him, I got you—I was patient zero.” Post-COVID, that two-word term has entered popular parlance as “the first to have a disease.” But as several critics and even epidemiologists have pointed out, patient zero was an unfortunate ’80s coinage based in a misreading of an HIV study in the earliest days of AIDS. In the LGBTQ+ community in particular, the term has a history as homophobic slander, and Swift should have picked another (admittedly less catchy) term for her song. It’s tone-deaf to a community she purports to care about and a distraction at best. (And you thought singing about her beau’s dick was offensive.)

It’s too bad, really, because the song itself is engaging. It’s got a graceful melody and a contagious hook that attaches to your auditory cortex remarkably quickly. It’s a Celtic-style fiddle tune, played by Scandinavian conductor and soloist Fredrik Burstedt, that anchors and cycles throughout the song, as Swift and producers Max Martin and Shellback layer on pinging synth drums and warm keyboards, as well as, buried deep in the mix, mandolin and pedal steel, in case Swift wants to keep pushing her “return to country” narrative. The violin hook is admirably unusual for a 2020s chart-topper. Honestly, I can’t think of too many current pop hits that deploy a fiddle hook in this loopy, naggingly insistent way—it’s not like disco strings. Really, the violin is more akin to Dexys Midnight Runners’ 1983 chart-topper “Come on Eileen,” only the fiddle has been turned from raucously joyous into a wistful bummer.

Swift wants that bummer aura, because the song is basically an elegy. It’s a novel, more funereal take on the old pop-song trope of two competing women cataloguing the flaws of a trifling man, from the Chess showtune ballad “I Know Him So Well” through the Whitney Houston–Deborah Cox you-in-danger-girl duet “Same Script, Different Cast.” Except Swift’s version is not a duet—it’s more of a Dear Jane letter to a would-be rival after the damage has been done to both of them.

There’s a temptation to make a song on this topic sassy and shady à la Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine,” but “Patient Zero” is more somber and vulnerable. Whatever snark is present in the song is suffused with regret: “I bet he burst into your life like fireworks / I bet he even said ‘I love you’ first.” And Martin and Shellback’s musical arrangement supports this vulnerability. My favorite moment in the song comes about half a minute before the end, when the chord progression subtly changes, reharmonizing around different bass notes to finally escape the tension and the drama. (Listen for it at 3:19—this Instagram video does a better job explaining it than I could with my meager musicology skills.) The synth chord change is an old-school touch that reminded me fondly of the sound of this vulnerable Janet Jackson ballad from the mid-’80s. (It wouldn’t be the first time Max Martin has tried to emulate Minneapolis-sound pioneers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.) And it happens just as Taylor is singing an outro with the song’s most heartsick, sympathetic lyrics: “I’m with it, I’ve been there / Felt the reeling, done the healing, said the curses and prayers / When the fever turns a dreamer into a pathetic ghost / If he’s killing you, I see you, I was patient zero.”

Swift doubles down on these goth sentiments in the gloomy music video, which of course she directed. (Swift started directing videos as early as 2010 and has helmed virtually all of her major videos since 2019.) She world-premiered the clip at September’s MTV Video Music Awards while collecting a bespoke VMA recognizing “artist directors.” Costarring Hollywood A-listers Dakota Johnson and Colin Farrell, the “Patient Zero” mini-movie depicts all the passive-aggressive stages of a love gone wrong, starring Swift as Johnson’s confidante and, in a final twist, the ghost of Farrell’s ex. The clip even begins and ends at a gravesite. Robert Smith would approve.

All in all, I’d say “Patient Zero,” as a song, is a solid B-tier Taylor Swift hit—better than her haters might rate it, but it’s no “Blank Space,” “All Too Well,” or “Anti-Hero.” If she were most other superstar pop acts, “Zero” would debut somewhere in the Top 10 and bounce around the upper-middle of the charts. (For example, last week, Drake dropped a handful of loosey tracks, including a goofy, boozy, slowed-down take on “Choosin’ Texas,” and this week the most popular of them debut at a modest—for him—No. 5, No. 11, and No. 18.) But because Taylor Swift is Taylor Swift, “Patient Zero” opened to the year’s best Spotify streams and entered the Hot 100 at No. 1 last week. It’s Swift’s 16^th career No. 1 on the big pop chart, which is already generating talk that Swift will be the one to eventually break the Beatles’ benchmark of 20 No. 1s—a cherished record that remains unbeaten despite Mariah Carey’s recent Christmas comeback. “Zero” is also, remarkably, Swift’s fourth No. 1 hit in the past 12 months and her seventh in under three years, dating back to “Cruel Summer” in the fall of 2023. She’s releasing music at an absurdly fast clip in the 2020s—I share my colleague Carl Wilson’s contention that she is overdue for a break—and being rewarded on the charts for virtually all of it. (Well … at least, the lead singles of her projects are all being rewarded. Except for the late-blooming “Cruel Summer” and the second Showgirl single “Opalite,” all of Taylor’s recent No. 1s have been the leadoff hits from newly announced albums or reissues, including the Toy Story 5 soundtrack.)

For all the scathing reviews the four-song The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore is receiving, “Patient Zero” is actually benefiting from the deluxe album rerelease—because there’s at least one other new song everyone hates more. I’ve heard a range of opinions on the dreamy “Pink Clouding” and the tender “Babylon,” but neither is as maligned as the dismal “Cleveland” (officially styled “Cleveland!”, because an exclamation point at the end of a Taylor Swift song title is never a good sign), another song about Cleveland native Travis Kelce, which even I won’t defend. A song Pitchfork calls “the absolute nadir of Swift’s catalog,” “Cleveland!” finds Taylor pettily clapping back at her haters’ cruelest online comments—about her marriage and, no kidding, her keister. It features an awful, douche-chill-worthy spoken-word bridge that suggests no one can really tell Swift no these days.

When the reissue arrived on the charts last week, four of the Top Five slots on the Hot 100 were instantly taken up by “Patient Zero” (No. 1), “Cleveland!” (No. 3), “Babylon” (No. 4) and “Pink Clouding” (No. 5). (Ella Langley broke up the all-Taylor party in the Top Five as “Choosin’ Texas” hung in at No. 2.) This result might suggest Swift’s fans are as indiscriminate as ever—I mean, “Cleveland!” a Top Three hit, really?! (Hey—hate listens are still listens.) But in the reissue’s second week, the difference in the four songs’ performance on the Hot 100 is stark: While “Zero” holds at No. 1, “Babylon” plummets to No. 34, “Clouding” to No. 38, and “Cleveland!” to, mercifully, No. 40. My point? The marketplace is a little more discriminating about Swift than it appears in the first week of any of her projects. Or, put another way, for all the ways Swift has juiced the song’s chart placement by selling multiple versions, “Patient Zero” is a fairly legitimate hit. On Billboard’s Radio Songs chart, the airplay component of the Hot 100, “Zero” launched last week at No. 16 and moves up a notch to 15^th in radio audience this week. That’s nothing special for Taylor, airplay-wise—several of her singles, including “Shake It Off” and “The Fate of Ophelia,” launched in radio’s top 10—but it does suggest that more passive, less rabid listeners will have “Zero’s” violin rattling around their head for a few weeks to come. Even on Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart, where “Patient Zero” did fade a bit in its second week, it still ranks second in streaming audience—folks are still choosing to play it—and the song seems poised to extend its reign at No. 1 again next week.

There comes a moment in every major pop star’s career where their omnipresence becomes so suffocating, it gets harder for the audience to properly judge the wheat from the chaff. It happened to me back in the day: In the ’90s, I got salty about Mariah Carey, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Céline Dion, artists I have since celebrated with their own Hit Parade episodes. Taylor Swift is well past that level of ubiquity. Even if you disagree with me about the merits of last year’s “Wood,” the Showgirl album was so maligned by the online hordes, after a few months I changed my assessment of it from overrated to slightly underrated. (“Elizabeth Taylor” and “Father Figure”—also very good! Loved “Ruin the Friendship,” too!) Swift fandom is starting to become a little like Saturday Night Live consumption: The best years were when you were a teenager, whenever that was—and yet, you still watch.

If there’s one thing for which I’m nostalgic, it’s not so much Taylor Swift’s ’00s and ’10s output. (I was … ahem, well past my teen years when her career began.) It’s her more measured release pattern from that period, when she was on a two-year album-cycle, and we had time to enjoy the songs before the next barrage showed up. Clearly, Taylor has her reasons for churning out this much music this rapidly—musical inspiration, no label or producer gatekeepers, family planning, who knows? For now, let’s appreciate that our pop overlord and her song factory can still churn out an earworm as juicy as “Patient Zero”—even when it comes with a side of “Cleveland!”