Laurel Hell
Mitski wasn’t sure she’d ever make it to her sixth album. After the release of 2018’s standout and star-making record *Be the Cowboy*, she simply had nothing left to give. “I think I was just tired, and I felt like I needed a break and I couldn\'t do it anymore,” she tells Apple Music. “I just told everyone on my team that I just needed to stop it for a while. I think everyone could tell I was already at max capacity.” And so, in 2019, she withdrew. But if creating became painful, not doing it at all—eventually—felt even worse. “I was feeling a deep surge of regret because I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do?’” she says. “I let go of this career that I had worked so hard to get and I finally got, and I just left it all behind. I might have made the greatest mistake of my life.” Released two years after that self-imposed hiatus, *Laurel Hell* may mark Mitski’s official return, but she isn’t exactly all in. Darkness descends as she moves back into her own musical world (“Let’s step carefully into the dark/Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around” are this album’s first words), and it feels like she almost always has one eye on her escape route. Such melancholic tendencies shouldn’t come as a surprise: Mitski Miyawaki is an artist who has always delved deep into her experiences as she attempts to understand them—and help us understand our own. More unexpected, though, is the glittering, ’80s-inspired synth-pop she often embraces, from “The Only Heartbreaker”—whose opening drums throw back to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and against which Mitski explores being the “bad guy” in a relationship—to the bouncy, cinematic “Should’ve Been Me” and the intense “Love Me More,” on which she cries out for affection, from a lover and from her audience, against racing synths. “I think at first, the songs were more straightforwardly rock or just more straightforwardly sad,” she recalls. “But as the pandemic progressed, \[frequent collaborator\] Patrick \[Hyland\] and I just stopped being able to stay in that sort of sad feeling. We really needed something that would make us dance, that would make us feel hopeful. We just couldn’t stand the idea of making another sad, dreary album.” This being a Mitski record, there are of course still moments of insular intensity, from “Everyone” to “Heat Lightning,” a brooding meditation on insomnia. And underneath all that protective pop, this is an album about darkness and endings—of relationships, possibly of her career. And by its finish, Mitski still isn’t promising to stick around. “I guess this is the end, I’ll have to learn to be somebody else,” she says on “I Guess,” before simply fading away on final track “That’s Our Lamp.”
We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.
Mitski’s sixth album is an austere, nuanced, and disaffected indie-pop record that, in part, addresses her turbulent relationship with her own career.
While Laurel Hell takes the singer-songwriter in new directions, the music loses its potency
The singer-songwriter almost quit before writing her sixth album, which blends hints of disco strut with a bold sense of the theatrical
Mitski reaches new levels of emotion and self-deprecation on Laurel Hell
The Japanese-American musician may find her success uncomfortable - but she still sounds great
While her defiance is effective, the futility gets heavy—when you don’t want to be pinned down, there’s far less to hold…
You can’t help but feel that it’s all one broken brick away from tumbling down, which is exactly why it plays out with such delicate urgency.
The tension between a craving to dance and the yearning to walk away dominates the new record
Stepping back into her own shoes after the character-driven Be the Cowboy, Mitski's fourth album, Laurel Hell, finds the songwriter in a less volatile, more (but not completely) resigned state of mind as she reflects on persistent incompatibility with partners, perceived disinterest in what she has to offer, and an overriding ennui.
Laurel Hell – Mitski’s bold return to music – brings enchanting beats, gut-wrenching honesty, and even more wisdom
After Mitski Miyawaki completed touring her acclaimed album Be the Cowboy in 2019, the singer-songwriter went dark. She deactivated her soci...
The sixth studio album of American singer-songwriter Mitski is highly-anticipated and long-awaited.
Laurel Hell, the latest album from Mitski, was over three years in the making. Several songs were written before or during 2018, the same time Be the Cowboy catapulted her to indie stardom.
Mitski’s ascension has been an odd one. While ‘Be The Cowboy’ made her the darling of the insider music scene, the public world seemed
The indie artist delivers devastating emotional truths and unsettling imagery – with sharp hooks and an 80s pop sheen
When this Mitski album is good, it's great – but there are problems here. Laurel Hell can be a detached listen when it's not in full flow
Mitski’s adoption of the decade’s tropes on ‘Laurel Hell’ comes across as muddled and at times mismatched to her songwriting.
Mitski's 'Laurel Hell' possesses a kind of weird timelessness. The album seems like an artifact from the past that somehow seems relevant in the present.
Laurel Hell by Mitski album review by Greg Walker. The new album drops on February 4, 2022 via Dead Oceans
After ‘quitting’ music in 2019, the emotionally-charged Japanese-American singer is back, and sounding better than ever