Mitski Miyawaki repackages her trademark melancholy into a retro pop format for her sixth studio album, Laurel Hell, just in time for the sad (but cool) people looking for songs to pine over an unrequited/long lost/frustrating love on Valentine’s Day. If you know Mitski from some of her more viral songs, though – “Your Best American Girl,” “Me and My Husband” – this is something different.
Listening to Laurel Hell feels like the result of Mitski jumping into Back to the Future’s DeLorean to time travel to the 1980s and make an album. The Japanese-American singer’s newest project is filled with songs that could score a romantic or coming-of-age film from that decade; one of the atmospheric ones, of course – more Dirty Dancing than Footloose.
Two of the album’s standout tracks, “Love Me More” and “The Only Heartbreaker,” are some examples of how Mitski and Patrick Hyland – who has produced every Mitski album after her 2012 debut Lush – pull from the era of electro-disco music. Put them on blast and you won’t be able to resist twirling in your room, imagining that you’re the triumphant protagonist who’s finally showing off the dance moves they’ve learned throughout the movie. Just swap out “What A Feeling” for “Love Me More” in that audition scene at the end of Flashdance.
Two of the album’s standout tracks, “Love Me More” and “The Only Heartbreaker,” are some examples of how Mitski and Patrick Hyland – who has produced every Mitski album after her 2012 debut Lush – pull from the era of electro-disco music. Put them on blast and you won’t be able to resist twirling in your room, imagining that you’re the triumphant protagonist who’s finally showing off the dance moves they’ve learned throughout the movie. Just swap out “What A Feeling” for “Love Me More” in that audition scene at the end of Flashdance.
The new music is climactic, but in a way that makes you wistful, thanks to all the nostalgic synths paired with Mitski’s impassioned delivery of bittersweet lines (“Should’ve Been With Me,” with all its electric organs and piano, is another good example). You listen to Laurel Hell to celebrate your Hero’s Journey (or Mitski’s), just like the main characters strictly follow to reach their destinations in those ’80s movies. Mitski touches on this in her interview with Crack, telling the magazine, “This album is full of resignation. A feeling of ending, but wrapped up in 80s inspired pop music.”
Perhaps, then, the polished pop in Laurel Hell reflects this sense of “resignation” from Mitski. While the emotions from the 31-year-old artist’s youth are not gone, she’s channeling them in a way that’s more contained compared to the raw and heartbreaking songs in past albums, like the guitar-heavy Puberty 2 and Bury Me At Makeout Creek. Regardless, relatable angst is still the heart of Laurel Hell. Just look at these lyrics from track No. 2, “Working for the Knife”:
I always knew the world moves on, I just didn’t know it would go without me.
As you can see, this is Mitski’s classic pull-at-your-heartstrings songwriting at work. You can’t help but annotate her lines with “Omg, wow, yes, this is how I feel” with the imaginary pen in your head. If you’re a die-hard Mitski fan, it’s still a bit of a jarring experience to hear such lines set to uptempo pop (unless you’re listening to some of the slower ballads on the album, like “I Guess” and “Valentine, Texas”).
This juxtaposition is intentional. Just look at the album’s name – Laurel Hell – which is a “Southern Appalachian term for the thickets that grow so dense and twisty,” per Entertainment Weekly. “They’re supposed to be hells that you can’t get out of.”… I like the notion of being trapped inside this maze and possibly dying within it, but also being surrounded by these beautiful, explosive flowers,” Mitski explains to the outlet.
So, yes, this album will make you want to dance like you’re Sarah Jessica Parker in Girls Just Want To Have Fun – that’s the feeling of being submerged in “explosive flowers.” But you can still put Laurel Hell on loop as you cry on your bed, or use it to score introspections of your love life in the form of seven-second text walls on TikTok. Leave it to Mitski to give us duality!
Mitski on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-GjYlrAWIHgwNDnbFHZ77g
Mitski on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/mitski/497546276
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