Zero is a number signifying nothing—literally, a null value.
[Video]
[4.69]
Claire Davidson: Part of me is slightly befuddled over why The Life of a Showgirl: Encore has caused so much fervor over its supposed lack of quality. The project is a deluxe re-release, and, as is the case with most such exercises, the songs were cut for a reason. “Patient Zero,” its perfunctory single, is as anodyne as they come, teasing listeners with a florid Celtic violin melody before lapsing into a two-note synth pad murmur that smacks of non-effort. If this more minimalist approach was meant to inspire a more confessional mode from Taylor Swift, it failed: the song’s conceit never evolves beyond the basic framework of watching a former partner deplete a younger, more naïve woman with his usual empty flattery. When Swift tries to swerve into dishier material on the bridge, preceded by the hair-raising line “so, let’s get into it,” the most damning accusation she can muster for her old beau—probably Joe Alwyn, but really, who cares—is that he… enjoys the feeling of being liked. (God forbid!) Swift’s mudslinging about this guy’s “Free Solo social climb” is pretty rich, coming from the woman who used her own engagement as a promotional tool for an earlier version of this very album, and who, once that wedding finally arrived, invited functional strangers to the event in order to rub shoulders with people who could help her win an Academy Award. If you want further proof of just how cynically Swift has synthesized her own drama with external signifiers of fame, just look at this song’s video: thanks to star Dakota Johnson and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, it effectively doubles as promo for both Verity and Digger. Swift’s personal narrative has superseded the work yet again; perhaps that’s why the world is so exasperated with her.
[4]
Al Varela: The Life Of A Showgirl is Taylor’s biggest disappointment in years, but that doesn’t mean she’ll never be good again; if anything, “Patient Zero” is a breath of fresh air for pop Taylor. The drum machines are a bit loud, but I like the banjo and violin swapping places in the verses and chorus. I like that Taylor delights in watching a girl realize the guy they both dated sucks and that nothing has changed, yet both of them are gonna be just fine. None of her snark is directed at the other girl, just the guy who once again fooled someone with an open heart and then crushed it the moment it inconvenienced him. Far from Taylor’s best, and by now I’m convinced that Taylor and Martin/Shellback were never a great fit for one another, but a solid pop song nonetheless.
[8]
Jel Bugle: The solid [6] era.
[6]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Immediately the most sonically interesting lead single she’s put out in years; where were these strings and drums on the main album, Shellback? Unfortunately, any goodwill here is capsized by the bridge and Swift’s reliance on what I regret to say I can only think of as the Jewish Dietary Supplements Flow.
[4]
Nortey Dowuona: The drums are not good. Shellback, one of Max Martin’s sidekicks, limply snaps back with a insubstantial snare that has neither impact nor texture. They clog up the mix and dull the violin and mandolin melodies, texturing it with a dull snickt! sound that feels both jarring and grooveless. Patient Zero for this would actually be either this or this, depending on whether you were born in the ’80s or ’90s.
[4]
James M Errington: I’m sorry, but I cannot see Stevie Wonder anywhere on the credits here, and this is clearly based on the melody to “Isn’t She Lovely.” Aside from that the song is ok, but that’s a really difficult thing to see past.
[4]
Tom Feckerdt: One of the many things that go unnoticed in Taylor Swift Discourse is her recent lack of direct musical influences. Ever since her “return” to pop on Midnights, Swift has built her own antiseptic sonic footprint with no immediate point of reference, and the music she’s put out since has been almost giddily not in conversation with current trends. She opens “Patient Zero” with an Irish-mocking violin, but there’s no connection whatsoever to popular styles that could accommodate that arrangement, like bluegrass-inspired country or the stomp-clap shit. Instead, the violin adorns a sterile, artificial beat. This insularity — the chance to hear what Swift comes up with when she doesn’t need to adapt to the music world around her — is, I believe, part of why she remains such a fascinating artist. The oddly-timed Life of a Showgirl “deluxe” represents a subtle but effective tightening of the ship after the many misgivings of her previous full-length, and the improvements are visible on this song. There’s a jaunty mainline that can move around, an eclectic arrangement that adds to the main tune, and a tried-and-true structure that still manages to surprise: come for the novelty of the song opening with the chorus, stay to hear how said chorus anchors the track by growing in harmonies and depth of instrumental with each run. There’s the incorporation of new-ish imagery for Swift (at least for one of her peppy lead singles), such as contagion, illness, and decay. The verses are there to kill time, and the bridge, always the weak spot for the so-called Queen Of Bridges, is awkward and overstuffed, but the outdoors-y, fake pastoral atmosphere provided by the Swedes goes a long way to endear you — one of the few songs of this era that properly balances holding dramatic tension while keeping the sonics light. If we were to take Swift’s new batch of songs as rebuttals of the various criticisms of Showgirl (like I have), “Patient Zero” effectively doubles down on her need to showcase the misery of her past affairs — particularly when contrasted with the jingle-happy “Cleveland!,” confirming once more that Swift is much more adept at writing about her losses than her gains. But when she describes the wounds of the relationship as “the fever turns the dreamer into a pathetic ghost”…that’s the kind of succinct one-liner storytelling that reflects back on parts of all of us. I would highly encourage a political read of that chorus.
[7]
Alfred Soto: If an epochal hitmaker comes up with a title alluding to some of the grisliest moments of public panic during the early HIV/AIDS crisis, then she better have the common sense to write a commensurate scenario, not another bowl of Quaker Oats coated with synthesized gauze.
[1]
David Allun Jones: It’s not for me to tell someone else what to do either, Taylor, but getting the big thoughts out of the way, first: you’re overdue for an extended break to give the people a chance to miss, and also, The Encore could have easily been a standalone EP (released a year from now because: extended break). That said, “Patient Zero” is a largely faultless display of Swiftian pop-craft that, while being B-plus-tier at best for her, could easily be a career-exploding classic for someone else. The choice to perform the bridge as a lopsided quasi-rap monologue leans on the wrong side of risk, but so much else of this toxic romance/women-supporting-women-themed microdrama crackles with cinematic spark. Tay patiently unfurls the meaning of its titular metaphor like a master of suspense with exquisite dashes of orchestral flourish and rewarding lyrical turns, both conversational (“I’ve gotta be honest/ I’ve been expecting your call…”) and poetically rich (“I bet he kissed the rain off your face”).
[8]
Charlotte Gaze: There may be no cure in the near term for Taylor Swift’s uncontrolled verbosity, which keeps threatening her hard-earned pop sensibility and wreaked havoc on her last album, but beneath the tortured poetry here is a refreshingly simple conceit about looking out for the next girl. Now granted, it’s slightly presumptuous to bill yourself “patient zero” given the near certainty of multiple girls preceding you in this situation, but that’s a nitpick and the benevolent intentions still stand. The song is tender, considered, and actually quite compassionate at its core. It’s born out of that longing for repairing that hurt and inadequacy someone left in you, and after being unable to help yourself, you help someone else. Much has been made of Swift’s alleged inability to write relatably anymore, but between this and “I Knew It, I Knew You” there’s evidence enough that she still has a heart.
[8]
Katherine St. Asaph: Taylor Swift, in her infinite canniness, has extended her career by creating a new floor for her musical output. That floor is “Wood.” All Taylor Swift singles will henceforth be judged by whether they are better than “Wood.” “Tango: Maureen: Taylor’s Version” is better than “Wood.”
[5]
Alex Clifton: I want to like “Patient Zero” more than I actually do. The Celtic-ish riff is quite nice, there are some solid images throughout (“bathing in your reflected light” is one of Swift’s better lines in a long time), and the conceit of talking to an ex-flame’s current girlfriend to warn her off is honestly pretty exciting. But. There’s always a but with Taylor Swift’s music these days. The talk-singing bridge is awfully grating, which sucks because the woman clearly knows how to write a bridge. “Patient Zero” additionally suffers from being attached to The Life of a Showgirl project, dragging her worst album era out even longer. There’s an odd smugness here, too, which doesn’t sit well with the idea of consoling someone else who has dated a jerk. “Take it from somebody who lost his games but won the race” — I won because I got out, you’re losing because you’re sticking with him. When combined with the “fuck the haters, here’s my MAN” marching-band disaster of “Cleveland!”, this reads less as comforting and more as crowing. Perhaps the biggest issue with “Patient Zero,” though, is that it came out now. Swift seems to fear fading from the public eye so much that she’s willing to put out anything to keep people talking. The discourse around her, her life, and her music is exhausting, and has diminishing returns.
[5]
Charli Jae Brister: TSwift long ago achieved escape velocity to put her in an orbit so rarefied that criticism is useless in the sense of warding people away from the art, but can be potent or at least bold in its assertions. I’ll try my hand at it: Swift is unique, a pop star that has never existed, and probably never will; a world-bestriding colossus so singular her success probably can’t be replicated. Her recent slide into mediocrity is what happens when there are no more worlds left to conquer. We are in the midst of looking upon her works and despairing, no doubt, but this too will be reduced to two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in the desert. And upon that pedestal, when we visit those antique lands to remember when she was good, those words will appear on that pedestal: “I got you/I was patient zero”.
[0]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this song makes me feel such deep disdain in the year 2026. Of course, Taylor’s billionaire status, refusal to comment on the Gaza genocide, and tedious money-grab album cycles have contributed to a pretty unfavorable zeitgeist—but is the music itself that bad? “Patient Zero” has many signature traits of a Taylor hit, from mid-tempo choruses, elaborate metaphors, and some hyper-specific moments, but they’re all dulled. (It hurts, too, that the showgirl conceit still makes little sense, even less so with an encore added.) “Patient Zero” is cringe not in the tenor of “ME!”, but because Swift lacks any of the self-awareness that was so piercing on tracks like “Anti-Hero.” The bridge, which the internet has already memed and discoursed to death, is particularly rancid. It feels like Taylor is going through the motions, without genuine reflection, evolution, and substance, and expecting her fans to genuflect as if we’re too naive to notice the difference.
[3]
Andrew Karpan: As with Drake, fellow postlapsarian pop star in fading twilight, Swift’s hits have become convoluted self-reverential cliches, actively pushing the work backward, toward some distantly remembered version of what these songs used to sound like; or more particularly, one of the more depressing ideas for what the future sounded like in, say, 2019.
[5]
Callie Petch: Every month, for myself and a couple of friends, I put together a playlist of songs from albums of note that are hitting round anniversaries: a fun little thing designed to satisfy my insufferable muso personality and feel our bones crumble to dust. This month, Taylor Swift’s debut album turns 20, so I popped “Teardrops on My Guitar” on the playlist. And man, the direct comparison between that and where she is now, in the midst of her seemingly neverending imperial regime — shout-out to Holiday Kirk and his essential piece on the current chart music wasteland for that term — does “Patient Zero” no favours. Sure, it’s a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison given that “Patient Zero” is a breakup-adjacent pop song and (supposedly) a hypothetical writing exercise, while “Teardrops” is a yearning, deeply personal country-pop ballad. But I really do not know how anyone could listen to both songs and not conclude that we have gone significantly backward. “Teardrops” is so much more poetic, so much more lush and warm in its sonic mixture, has a much catchier chorus, and Swift’s voice aches with emotion since she didn’t record it in the midst/aftermath of a gruelling two-year 149-date world tour. Where are the dynamics? You keep Max Martin on retainer and have him do this antiseptic flatness, again? All of the vocal melodies are so static I should start calling her Win Butler circa-Everything Now. Her voice is still shot from the Eras Tour, and you can tell from how little emotion is in her delivery, how rooted to the spot her vocals are, and why she’s still writing spoken-word bridges that torpedo any momentum. She’s still overwriting her lyrics to live up to the “English teacher” moniker she’s bestowed upon herself. The most noteworthy aspect is the violin, and look, I enjoy me some The (beautiful, beautiful) Corrs, but the thing about their violins is that they sounded good. Something about either the EQ or the tuning on these makes my skin crawl — it’s too shrill. I’m really not trying to be a Taylor Hater. Though I’ve never been a Swiftie — and view Swifties the same way we view Manson Family members, especially the online ones — I have grown to appreciate a fair bit of her catalogue thanks to folklore and being freed from the tyranny of her often dreadful single choices. But her tank is beyond empty, and her refusal to go away or relinquish her hold on pop culture for even a second is murdering her creative output. The imperial regime cannot be allowed to pause.
[3]