Taylor Swift's new single 'Look What You Made Me Do' was one of the most highly anticipated music releases of the year - but judging from reviews and online reaction, one of the most disappointing too.
The song lived up to hopes it would be a diss track following her high-profile feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, with many of the lyrics making it clear she's pursuing revenge after they brought about her very public fall from grace last year.
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However the lyrics have been blasted for their perceived pettiness, and the song criticised for being drab, uninteresting and far-removed from the most-loved music in her portfolio.
Some even lambasted it for its uncanny likeness to Right Said Fred's 1991 hit 'I'm Too Sexy' - a resemblance that earned the band a writing credit on the song and a share of its royalties.
Spin Magazine perhaps best summed up the collective response to the single by simply stating: "Taylor Swift made us stay up all night for this."
"'Look What You Made Me Do' is a hard, cheerless left turn, an unbalanced farrago to accompany the left-to-right top-to-bottom text jumble on the cover of her new album Reputation," Anna Garca wrote.
"The self-mythologising is verging on satire, the beef with West feels endless and increasingly futile."
The Guardian's Maura Johnston labelled the track "acid gossip that borrows from better songs", referring to her lyrics as "visceral and almost sloppy" - while Vulture's Frank Guan took aim at her vocal performance.
"Pop music is never not repetitive, but Swift's repetitions, for the first time ever in her career, sound wearying instead of catchy," he said.
"For all the serpent-themed hype leading up to the launch of the song, Swift's words lack venom, fangs, and smoothness. They have the consistency of wet flour, and their meaning could be converted into a series of impotent hisses without any loss in translation.
"As far as her arch-nemeses Kim and Kanye go, it's completely impossible to imagine them doing anything but laughing, hard, at 'Look What You Made Me Do'. They've 'made' Taylor Swift release the worst music of her career: What could possibly be less intimidating than that?"
Pitchfork's Meaghan Garvey also took issue with how Swift addressed the feud, saying her attempts at "weaponising a long-held grudge aims for menace but feels more like a salty 'Fergalicious'".
"She's uncharacteristically un-nuanced, and when she slips in hilariously artless digs like 'I don't like your tilted stage,' it sounds like the part of a break-up when you start hurling all the banal insults you've got left.
"Ultimately, there is something undeniably sus in Swift's petty glee at dragging a mostly-forgotten beef into a dramatic album rollout a year later."
Swift's upcoming album Reputation, from which 'Look What You Made Me Do' is taken, is scheduled for release on November 10.
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