Mitski deploys a full pop arsenal in “Love Me More.” Its title is concise and hook-ready the track has a brisk beat and sturdy major chords, and when the chorus arrives, the drums kick harder while cascading piano chords and glittery synthesizers surround her like a barrage from a confetti cannon.
The same desperation suffuses “Heat Lightning,” with droning guitars and muffled drums backing a desperate confession: “There’s nothing I can do, not much I can change/I give it up to you, I surrender.” And in the brief but telling “I Guess,” Mitski mourns the loss of a lifelong companion over hazy, tolling keyboard chords her vocal melody wanders in and out of dissonance, as if the outside world is oblivious to her sorrow. Instead, “I opened my arms wide to the dark/I said take it all, whatever you want,” only to find later that she can’t escape. In the stark “Everyone,” her voice floats above an impassive, ticking drum-machine beat and doggedly repeating synthesizer notes, while Mitski admits that she defied everyone’s advice. In “Working for the Knife,” she struggles to pull herself out of a creative block, over sustained synthesizer tones, a trudging beat and gusts of spaghetti-western guitar: “I always thought the choice was mine,” she sings, “And I was right, but I just chose wrong.” Throughout “Laurel Hell,” Mitski, now 31, both misses and rejects her youthful naïveté. “I apologize, you forgive me,” she sings while the chord progression climbs is it elevating her or drowning her? A disco march laced with firm piano chords and blippy synthesizers carries her through “Stay Soft” as she counsels, “Open up your heart/Like the gates of hell,” then declares, “You stay soft, get beaten/Only natural to harden up.” In “The Only Heartbreaker” - the album’s one co-written song, by Mitski and Dan Wilson (who has also collaborated with Adele, Taylor Swift and the Chicks) - the kind of upbeat, pulsing neo-1980s production lately favored by the Weeknd pumps along as she promises to accept any blame for a failing relationship. The album cover shows her dressed in red with bold crimson lipstick, laying back with her eyes closed in an expression that could be ecstasy or torment.Īs Mitski contemplates risks taken and lessons learned, her ambivalences are fine-tuned. Yet Mitski doesn’t entirely reject pop gloss, especially when she can give it an ironic twist. The new album is largely electronic and inward-looking, filled with a pandemic-era sense of isolation, regret and reassessment. On “Laurel Hell,” Mitski takes just half a step back from that extroversion. Along the way, her music has moved through piano-centered orchestral pop, guitar-driven indie-rock and, with “Be the Cowboy” in 2018, a willingness to try for pop bangers. Over the decade she has chronicled yearnings, frustrations, messy romances, the life of a performer and the persistence of doubts and questions. Strategic, sure-footed, vulnerable and prepared to face all sorts of trouble: That sums up Mitski’s songwriting as it has unfolded on the albums she has been making since she was a music student in 2012. “Let’s step carefully into the dark,” Mitski sings to begin her new album, “Laurel Hell,” and continues, “Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around.”
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