For the past few years, it’s felt like Taylor Swift’s goal has been expansion at any cost. For longtime fans, the price of Swift becoming the world’s biggest pop star is clear: On The Life of a Showgirl, her 12th album, the pinpoint specificity that defined her best work has all but evaporated, replaced by flaccid podcast-related sexual innuendo and clunker words like “legitly.”

“Father Figure” throws the shift into stark relief. Picking up on ideas of fame, power, and respectability that she explored to great effect on folklore’s “The Last Great American Dynasty” and The Tortured Poets Department’s “Clara Bow”—a thread that leads all the way back to “The Lucky One,” from Red—“Father Figure” is a rare flash of reality amid Showgirl’s cartoony odes to tradwifery and Gucci-clad bad girls.

It is, arguably, Swift’s most straightforward appraisal of her own power: Casting herself as a steely mafioso, she sings about the financial benefit of being even a minor player in the Swiftiverse and casually bemoans the fact that, no matter how much money you might make for someone, you can never guarantee their fealty. “Father Figure” works because—unlike so many of Swift’s songs about broken friendships or business partnerships—any bitterness is hidden many layers deep, beneath actual jokes (“I can make deals with the devil/Because my dick’s bigger”) and chilly, spectral production that sounds like Beach House by way of Carly Rae Jepsen.

“Father Figure” will be pored over for Easter eggs—I have already seen fans fighting over whether it’s about Scott Borchetta or Olivia Rodrigo—which misses the point by a mile: Musically deft and lyrically economical in a way that the rest of Showgirl isn’t, the sweetly sinister “Father Figure” suggests that there might still be a sharper, more interrogative Swift waiting in the wings for when the showgirl’s time is up.