On Slant Magazine's list of the best 2010s-decade album published in 2019, Reputation ranked at number 88. The Independent critic Roisin O'Connor and Vulture journalist Craig Jenkins both regarded Reputation as a showcase of Swift's both vindictive and vulnerable sides; [50] the former lauded it for displaying Swift's talents capturing emotional details "that you as a listener cannot". It’s even got this post-hook of drums — I wanted them to sound like Dothraki drums […] ‘I Did Something Bad,’ I wrote after Arya and Sansa conspire to kill Littlefinger. She worked with UPS leading up to the album’s release, and partnered with Ticketmaster to help dedicated fans be the first to score tickets to her 2018 tour.

Throughout late 2017 and early 2018, a string of singles were released to support the album: "End Game" was released to French radio by Mercury Records on November 14, [105] "New Year's Day" impacted US country radio on November 27, [106] and "Delicate" was released to US pop radio on March 12. Other albums I’ve made have felt like a scrapbook of different memories, but there was something overarching about the theme of this album for me. To promote the album, Swift teamed up with Target to produce two exclusive magazines which feature poetry, paintings, handwritten lyrics, and a behind-the-scenes look at the music video for lead single “Look What You Made Me Do. Swift's image as a woman with serial romantic relationships and her defiant attitude against this reputation are recurring themes on the first tracks. Gorgeous" has playful lyrics about newfound romantic attraction, where the narrator feels tempted to cheat on an existing boyfriend for another.Commenting on the album's rollout cycle, music scholar Jadey O'Regan remarked how Swift used "the art of pop in the best way" for utilizing "the way she's been stereotyped in popular culture". Martin and Shellback co-wrote and produced nine, and Antonoff co-wrote and co-produced the remaining six, all of which were co-produced by Swift. She embarked on the Reputation Stadium Tour, which kicked off on May 8, 2018, in Glendale, Arizona and featured supporting acts such as Charli XCX and Camila Cabello.

Pitchfork critic Jamieson Cox described the instrumentation as "hair-raising bass drops, vacuum-cleaner synths [. In the wider English-speaking world, it topped the albums charts of Australia, [134] New Zealand, [128] the UK, [135] Ireland, [136] and Canada.

Her name is printed multiple times over one side of her face, in a typeface resembling that used in newspapers. With 1989 's synth-pop production, Swift departed from the country music scene to embrace mainstream pop. Inspired by the fantasy series Game of Thrones, she split the album's lyrical scope in two: one is about the downsides of fame and the resultant anger, and the other about love amidst the tumult.