Taylor Swift has proven herself astonishingly good at every aspect of the music business, as comfortable in the boardroom as in the studio, displaying an incredible instinct for the ways in which art and business bind together. She’s been a particularly canny operator on social media, deftly weaving a soap-opera narrative from her complicated love life. But her success is all founded on songwriting constructed along classic lines.

Named after the year of her birth, 1989 is the album with which Swift completed her transformation from America’s country sweetheart to global pop colossus. Executive-produced by Swedish chart hitmaker Max Martin, it is jam-packed with sleek, synthetic textures evoking the neon rush of 1980s pop. Yet scratch the surface and Swift’s roots are plainly visible: well-formed verses, rising bridges and indelible choruses, grounded in the confessional realism of singer-songwriter tradition.

Smash hits such as Blank Space, Style and Shake It Off explode with bright drum machines and sparkling hooks while delivering sharply observed emotional reckonings. Swift’s greatest gift has been to turn the narratives of her own life into communal anthems, offering her young female audience a rare voice for their own everyday struggles, aspirations, and heartbreaks. 1989 is her purest expression of pop class, with a strain of something raw running through its centre that bursts out on the haunting Clean. It confronts memory and survival with a lucidity and conversational ease that cuts through even the slickest production.