Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ Is the Final Horseman of the Tumblr-Era Revival

The dulcet clangs and synths of a Jack Antonoff-produced pop album are ringing through the air, Urban Outfitters is selling a new Arctic Monkeys LP, and American Apparel turtlenecks are cool again. What year is it? If you’ve started to feel some deja vu, you’re not alone. With the release of several long-anticipated albums from Taylor Swift, The 1975, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Arctic Monkeys, the Tumblr girl era is making its way to the stage, and ushering in a 2014 revival. The vibe shift that has long been foretold isn’t coming — it’s already here.

Tumblr, the now-dowdy social media site, experienced one of its last heydays in 2014 when the site’s blogging aspect and compatibility with photo sites like Pinterest created an era-defining look. It was populated by photosets of skinned knees and ripped tights, cigarettes, bleached hair, winged eyeliner, and glitter Doc Martens, but perhaps the longest-lasting remnant of that age is the music. Entire blogs gained followings for placing self-reflective or complicated pop lyrics into melancholy black-and-white photosets. Now with the release of four Tumblr-reminiscent albums, fans on TikTok are celebrating that the beloved 2014 Tumblr era is back in the spotlight (and blasting through their headphones).

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In their newest offerings, each of the musical acts comes to different conclusions about nostalgia. One of the most enduring aspects of Swift as a songwriter is her willingness to evoke the past; the pop star has established herself with her ability to draw a narrative line through her own life and experiences. Midnights, released last Friday (along with seven bonus tracks), is no different. New songs like “Lavender Haze” and “You’re on Your Own, Kid” center themselves on queries about aging and her anxieties around perception. “Vigilante Shit” even includes a lyric about drawing on eyeliner “sharp enough to kill a man.”

But it’s “Labyrinth” that encapsulates both Swift’s nostalgia and return to a Tumblr-esque melancholy.  The song details Swift’s emotions about falling in love again, centering around dread. “It only hurts this much right now/Was what I was thinkin’ the whole time… I’ll be gettin’ over you my whole life.” The song uses Swift and Antonoff’s signature synths but twists listeners’ expectations with its anxious words. “Never trust it if it rises fast/It can’t last.” Maybe this is why “Labyrinth” is the only Midnights song Swift teased during her New York University Commencement Speech months earlier, in which Swift encouraged students to lean into the uncomfortableness of knowing that life is full of choices they will most likely get wrong. After reminding students that they were on their own now, a thought she called both “scary” and “cool, Swift quoted the then-unreleased song: “As long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing, we will breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out.”

Jepsen and Swift, two sides of a chart-topping indie-pop coin, use their albums to reminisce and look back on old memories (and lovers) with a new, more mature mindset. In Jepsen’s The Loneliest Time, the titular single describes nostalgia for an old flame and determines that a return to the relationship could end differently this time, using the same high-energy pop that Jepsen is famous for. “The Loneliest Time” is certified viral on TikTok, with thousands of videos using the lyrics “I’m coming back for you baby” — specifically to talk about returning to their old Tumblr outfits.

For the 1975 and the Arctic Monkeys, the past is treated with the same wistfulness as Swift and Jepsen but is used to invoke grief in the band’s songs for a time in life the artists can’t get back.

Older albums by The 1975 were defined by questions about what the future holds and how society and the internet interact with a person’s personal search for answers. That same seeking quality is even more present in Being Funny In A Different Language, with lead singer Matty Healy going into specifics — “I’m sorry if you’re living and you’re 17” — about a future generation’s ability to love. On TikTok, the song “About You” is slowly growing in views, with over 6,000 videos of TikTokers reminiscing about how the return of the Tumblr-era vibe is allowing them to bring new life experiences to old emotions. The Arctic Monkeys’ biggest album AM defined 2014 Tumblr with its iconic riffs and soul-seeking lyrics for “Do I Wanna Know” and “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?” So even though their new album Car sounds noticeably different from AM, TikTok users have called the return of the group, and their refined sound, an offering for Tumblr fans who want to be nostalgic without fully regressing back into the feelings of that year. In a fit check set to “Sculptures of Anything Goes,” one user called the album “for the reformed 2014 Tumblr girls.”

What cements these four different artists so firmly to the Tumblr aesthetic is their attempt to capture genuine questions they have about life without deigning to have the solutions. Tumblr’s 2014 era was populated by an underage fan base desperate to understand the raging hormones and general stress that came with being under 18 and having no power or funds to change the most basic things. The answer to all of life’s problems at that time? Dramatics. The era was so focused on the aesthetics of emotions that even a pop song — when placed on a black and white photo of clouds or underneath a monotone photo of a birthday cake, or even written on their arms in Sharpie — managed to capture how people felt about life. In the past eight years, experts have linked a rise in nostalgia media to a need for comfort. And for a generation that is still navigating getting older with a pervasive sense of existential dread, it tracks that a musical return to an emotionally volatile but familiar time might make people feel better. So even though it’s 2022, and most former Tumblr teens are likely listening to these new albums in their offices instead of barricaded in their bedrooms, a combined return from the biggest bands of 2014 Tumblr is the nostalgia-driven vibe shift some people have been waiting for. Maybe the real treasure was the aesthetics we loved along the way?

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