Mitski – Laurel Hell (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Mitski – Laurel Hell (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 32:31 minutes | 647 MB | Genre: Indie Pop, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Dead Oceans

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 favourite 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.

In 2018, singer-songwriter Mitski (Miyawaki) released the much-acclaimed Be the Cowboy. Just over a year later, she announced that she was taking a break—from touring, from social media; in other words, from the public eye. “I sense that if I don’t step away soon, my self-worth/identity will start depending too much on staying in the game, in the constant churn. I don’t want to make art like that,” she tweeted. Now, you can hear exactly what she was wrestling with—and how—on her seventh studio album, Laurel Hell. The lyrically devastating “Working for the Knife” is an up-close self-examination of one’s creative reality and dashed dreams: “I cry at the start of every movie I guess/ ’cause I wish I was making things too/ But I’m working for the knife.” It would be too flip to call it the sound of a quarter-life crisis; it’s more the realization that successful art is a commodity, complete with horns mocking your pain. At once strident and dreamy, it brings to mind Tori Amos. “Stay Soft” is the natural follow-up to how you deal with the vagaries of the world. “You stay soft, get beaten/ Only natural to harden up,” Mitski sings against a chill dancefloor track. Like much of the record, it is delightfully ’80s-inflected, vibrating with appealingly plasticky synth and crisp percussion. So are “The Only Heartbreaker,” which sounds like the soundtrack for a movie nightclub scene from that era, and “Love Me More”—a slow burn that builds to a frenzy of Mitski chanting “clean me up, clean me up.” “Should’ve Been Me” is Top 40 joyous in the vein of a Phil Collins song—all jangling melody, wild blares and finger-snap-style percussion. It could be read as an apology for checking out: “I haven’t given you what you need/ You wanted me but couldn’t reach me/ I’m sorry, it should’ve been me.” Hymn-like “I Guess” is about the end of a relationship, but the song’s so dreamy and malleable that it could be romantic or platonic love, about another person or a once-passionate goal. “That’s Our Lamp” is more clear. As the narrator leaves home after a fight with her partner, she sees things, literally, from the outside and reaches the realization that you can love someone without liking them—a conclusion that triggers a swell of street and crowd sounds to momentarily drown out the pain. WIth the longest song clocking in at just 3:47, these are perfect little portals to remind you that singular ache and longing can be remarkably universal. – Shelly Ridenour

Tracklist:

1-1. Mitski – Valentine, Texas (02:35)
1-2. Mitski – Working for the Knife (02:38)
1-3. Mitski – Stay Soft (03:16)
1-4. Mitski – Everyone (03:47)
1-5. Mitski – Heat Lightning (02:51)
1-6. Mitski – The Only Heartbreaker (03:04)
1-7. Mitski – Love Me More (03:32)
1-8. Mitski – There’s Nothing Left Here for You (02:52)
1-9. Mitski – Should’ve Been Me (03:11)
1-10. Mitski – I Guess (02:15)
1-11. Mitski – That’s Our Lamp (02:24)

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