Reviewed by Michelle Garcia ||

This year, Japanese-American musician, Mitski Miyawaki, debuted her latest album, which offers eleven new tracks, titled Laurel Hell, following her album Be The Cowboy (2018). This album marks the artist’s fourth album released under a record label, contrary to the independent release of her first two albums, Lush (2012) and Retired from Sad, New Career in Business (2013), which were self-released as student projects during her time as a liberal arts student at Purchase College’s Conservatory of Music. 

Mitski, however, wasn’t always interested in music being the central focus of her career and had first enrolled at Hunter College to study film before transferring to Purchase College to study studio composition at the State University of New York. 

Mitski references this career switch in her latest album Laurel Hell with lyrics: 

“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

I used to think I would tell stories

But nobody cared for the stories I had about

No good guys”

Here, she expresses feeling regret for not having pursued film and explores deeper into the feeling of being torn from pursuing a career that demands large amounts of vulnerability in order to produce content, only for it to later be consumed by the public with little regard to the artist or the creative process.

In doing so, there is a dynamic created between the artist and consumers, where the artist and the art has now been commodified to the point that ‘sadness’, like in Mitski’s and many other artists’ case, is now viewed as a selling point of her career, rather than as an act of expression. Examples of this can be found with the existence of the ‘sad girl’ persona that fans assign artists who’ve made notable marks in their career by producing melancholy tracks. However, many artists (such as Lorde and Lucy Dacus) fall victim to negative fan reactions when producing new content that doesn’t reflect their usual ‘sad girl’ vibes. 

In “Working for the Knife”, there are a series of instrumentals that gradually change over a slow beat that garners a looming sound Mitski fans are familiar with—probably the reason why it was chosen as the first single released for her debut following a two-year hiatus.

Other tracks like “Everyone” and “I Guess” weren’t released as singles but hold similar song structures that follow a slow tempo and lethargic tones seen in earlier work of her career. Another inclusion to this category would be “Heat Lightning”, if it weren’t that the repeating chorus strongly resembles gospel music with lyrics such as:

“And there’s nothing I can do, not much I can change

So I give it up to you, I hope that’s okay

There’s nothing I can do, not much I can change

I give it up to you, I surrender”

While I support Mitski’s decision to grace us with her evangelical wisdom through her music, I’d like to keep those two sounds separate and instead, would like to move forward with focusing on the positive new sounds Mitski brought to her album. One being heavy use of synth chords and rich vocals in tracks such as “Valentine, Texas” and the melodramatic build up in songs like “There’s Nothing Left For You”, where a drastic shift in volume is present and instrumentals that remind me of a theatrical tactics used by musical songwriters that incorporate an accompanying instrumental into the power ballads of songs and create an abrupt drop in noise to create a dramatic shift in emotional power in the song that you would usually see as a closer for the first half of a Broadway show. Now, as a former theater enthusiast, I am once again pleading Mitski to keep these two sounds separate as I believe each are strong in their respective platforms.

Joking aside, I strongly believe Mitski has done a great job following a pop format that allows her the creative freedom to create catchy hooks with killer lyrics; creating these upbeat catchy choruses with detrimental lyricism have proven to be a major part of her career’s success following the surge of new fans after the viral trend of, what are now her most popular songs, “Nobody” and “Washing Machine Heart” on social media platform TikTok.

Tracks like “That’s Our Lamp”, “Stay Soft”, “Should’ve Been Me”, and “The Only Heartbreaker” bring a twist to Mitski’s pop format ability and in my opinion serve as the representation of the artist’s new era. These songs feature a sound of resilience and transcendence through meticulous composition and offer a combination of different sounds to add to Mitski’s palette such as new wave, synth pop, and disco. 

While “Love Me More” could have been included in the above list of true Laurel Hell (2022) representation, I believe it has earned its spot as the final song mention of this review as I’d like to consider it as me reserving the best for last. This song depicts Mitski’s strong desire to be appreciated for the person she is rather than the person she must become in order to be loved with lyrics like:

“Here’s my hand

There’s the itch

But I’m not supposed to scratch

I need you to love me more

Love me more, love me more

Love enough to fill me up

Fill me up, fill me full up”

It’s hard not to assume that because of this song’s message, it serves a greater purpose being the first track on her live performance set list for the Laurel Hell 2022 tour. What better way to start the comeback of your career than with a plea to fans for acceptance? However, it’s hard to tell whether these pleas are falling onto deaf ears as Mitski took to social media platform Twitter to tweet about concert etiquette for her tour.

On February 24, 2022, Mitski tweeted that fans should consider putting their phones away to not only limit the use of flash photography, but to also set up a connection between the artist and the fans. As Mitski puts it, “feeling of connection, of sharing a dream, and remembering that we have a brief miraculous moment of being alive at the same time, before we part ways. I’m part of something bigger. When I’m on stage and look to you but you are gazing into a screen, it makes me feel as though those of us on stage are being taken from and consumed feel as content, instead of getting to share a moment with you.” Mitski’s tweets raise a conversation for concert-goers on whether living in this digital age makes it socially acceptable for one to record without having any regard to the subject. 

The extent of disregard can be measured by not only opting to use flash photography at a live performance but also by engaging in the need to record the entirety of the set rather than briefly. While some may argue the validity of this argument, it would only be fair to take Mitski’s request into fair consideration when going to the event given that she is making a simple request (like many other performing artists, such as Bob Dylan, who famously placed a no-picture policy for his concert in 2016) but she is also choosing to do so following a hiatus that was influenced by negative reactions from fans in the past. 

Although Mitski was able to debunk what was arguably the most problematic negative reaction to stem from Mitski fans back in 2019, it certainly affected the artist as shortly after, she announced her plan to go into hiatus mid-tour for her album ‘Be The Cowboy’. What many fans at the time didn’t know was that, according to Mitski’s interview with Cracked, she had already decided the night of her hiatus announcement that she would be ending her musical career. 

Fortunately, with the release of Laurel Hell, Mitski is back bigger and better than ever! Although it’s not expected for everyone to be aware of the context behind Mitski’s choices as an artist throughout her musical career, I hope this review manages to shed some light to the now-deleted thread of Mitski tweets and hopefully garners a more complicit reaction from fans planning to attend the remaining shows of the 2022 Laurel Hell tour.

With all of that being said, my overall rating of the Laurel Hell (2022) album is 4/5 stars.