After collaborating with Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon on 2020’s folklore and evermore, Taylor Swift took the natural next step and featured on the duo’s Big Red Machine project. Recorded in the same breath as folklore’s Grammy win, “Renegade” shares the thoughtfulness of Swift’s 2020 songwriting renaissance but leaves her words wandering in Dessner and Vernon’s exploratory landscape.

The relationship at the heart of “Renegade” is claustrophobic and tangled in anxiety to the point of mutual destruction. “Is it insensitive for me to say, ‘Get your shit together so I can love you?’” Swift sings, her wordy outpour punctuated by a little squiggle of an acoustic riff. “Is it really your anxiety that stops you from giving me everything?/Or do you just not want to?” “Renegade” is a ball of frustration and indecision, but the composition is bright and warm, and Vernon’s harmonies make the whole thing less lonely. Even Swift’s characteristically sharp barbs are coated in empathy: “You fire off missiles because you hate yourself/But do you know you’re demolishing me?” By the end of “Renegade,” Vernon and Swift’s dueling harmonies twirl together into a cocoon of confusion.