Try and imagine 1989 is the first time you’ve heard Taylor Swift. Have a go. Judging by this, it's hard to believe she ever had any connection with country music at all, isn’t it? But Swift has always been a savvy pop artist, remember. To say otherwise is to forget that ‘You Belong with Me’ and ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ are pure pop at heart.

1989 is a far more focused, leaner record than its predecessors, whose polished production is indicative of the clear vision of the woman on the cover. Remember the video to lead single ‘Shake It Off’, where she goes all gawky but actually subtly sets herself apart from everyone else? This is Swift at her most overtly ambitious and self-aware: on the musically complex meta-narrative ‘Blank Space’, she caricatures her songwriting and recognises her tendency to play with fire (“I love the players, and you love the game”).

Particularly impressive is the trio of songs apparently about Harry Styles, all weaved around imagery of driving: “Midnight, you come and pick me up”, she begins in ‘Style’, before he crashes the car and hospitalises himself in ‘Out of the Woods’. By the end? “All I know is that you drove us off the road,” she laments in ‘All You Had to Do Was Stay’, though the perkiness of the production is vastly overshadowed by the towering, anthemic choruses of the two tracks preceding it.

The warmth of tracks like ‘Treacherous’ is notably absent among the electronics, but this is the corollary of her newfound maturity. That’s not to say there aren’t histrionics: it wouldn’t be a Swift record without unnecessary cheap shots like ‘Bad Blood’, but she is jaded at points, surveying past relationships with Lana del Ray-esque coolness on the brilliantly frosty ‘Wildest Dreams’, where her only hope is that she be remembered when it’s over. “I can see the end as it begins” is a far cry from the hopeless romanticism of ‘Enchanted’. She sings its opening couplets like she’s woken up in a cheap hotel room with a hangover.

Even the lightest moments are balanced by lyrical shade (“when you left her all alone and never told her why”, on ‘How You Get the Girl’). By the record’s close, there is only relief to be clean of it all. There’s none of the coffee shop date optimism of ‘Begin Again’ here.

There are still some real duds. Ryan Tedder’s production contributions in particular are excruciatingly tuneless compared to the rest of the record, one of which should have been sacrificed for the brilliant bonus track ‘New Romantics’, purely for fantastically over-the-top lyrics like “’Cause baby I could build a castle out of all the bricks they threw at me.”

Swift has said she took inspiration from Madonna while recording 1989, and the sense of reinvention is strong. “Everybody here was someone else before,” she notes on ‘Welcome to New York’, and Swift has called ‘Like a Prayer’ “legitimately one of the greatest pop songs of all time”. She’s not there yet. 1989 is more like 1986’s True Blue, with its range of pop stylings and palpable ambition. But if her ‘Like a Prayer’ moment is to come, then this is the start of an exciting phase in her career.