REVIEW: Mitski's "Laurel Hell" – the full range of human emotions in 32 mins and 31 seconds
Column by Nick Peta
Photo is MItski’s album art
Laced with hooks sharp enough to impale the faint of heart, Mitski returns to the sad-girl throne with her 6th studio album, “Laurel Hell.” It's equipped with daggers of 80s synth-pop, fever dream orchestrations, and lyricism that could’ve only been conjured from experiencing sleep paralysis. Mitski’s themes of unrequited love and emotional suppression in “Laurel Hell” are valid reminders that the red on the pride flag stands for Mitski.
Since her last album, “Be the Cowboy,” Mitski has been about as vacant from social media as Melania Trump has been since November 2020. Mitski is an emo chameleon of the music industry, altering her progressive production with the times, paving the path for the future, just to disappear and reappear, releasing a new project as if nothing ever happened. Following Mitski’s departure from social media in 2018, she privately decided to quit the music scene - that is until she realized she owed her label one last album: Dead Oceans.
The driving single of this record came from the release of “Working for the Knife,” on Oct. 5, 2021. It was a Tuesday morning, the day before the new moon in Libra, aaaaand during Mercury Retrograde. During the new moon, and particularly the new moon in Libra, celestials often invite us to transform the aspects of our life that are no longer working for us. Mitski coincidentally released “Working for the Knife," a song that delivers the lyrical stinger, “Now at twenty-nine, the road ahead appears the same.” Mitski responds, “Though maybe at thirty, I'll see a way to change.” On “Working for the Knife,” we get a lot of classic Mitski sounds, her haunting shadow of a voice accompanied by a piano that sounds like it was recovered from a saloon straight out of the Wild West, paired with distorted synth pads and clamoring metallic ostinatos lasting the entire song. I would be willing to bet that Nate Jacobs (Euphoria character) secretly cries to this iconic Mitski track.
In my opinion, “Laurel Hell” is not only Mitski’s best album, but it is also her most emotionally vast album, evoking the full range of human emotions in the project’s 32 minutes and 31 seconds. Don’t get me wrong, her 2014 album “Bury Me At Makeout Creek” is certainly moving, but “Laurel Hell” is the emotional result of an artist that has lived hundreds of lifetimes in the span of three years.
With this being Mitski’s last album owed to her label, it feels strange that it is the most commercial-sounding album of Mitski’s discography, perhaps as a massive “F-you” to her label. Bangers like “The Only Heartbreaker” and “Should’ve Been Me” embrace the 80s synth-pop sound that has recently been associated with the Weeknd, except Mitski does it by evoking actual emotion and curating cohesive melodic lines. The Weeknd is simply the straight man’s Mitski.
“Love Me More” delivers some of the most brutal blows on the project as Mitski battles the synths singing “Drown it out, Drown me out,” beseeching for reciprocation in a one-sided relationship. Following this track with “There’s Nothing Left for You” seems just a little too personal. This track is the power ballad of the album, giving a reoccurring synth progression that feels like a heartbeat on the verge of an anxiety attack. This emotional roller-coaster seems to end as quickly as it began, slyly stripping listeners of their harnesses, leaving them to free-fall into the last 3 tracks on the album. This will likely be the last time we hear from Mitski for quite some time. With the penultimate track “I Guess,” Mitski whispers, “Without you, I don't yet know, quite how to live” and “From here, I can tell you, thank you,” offering listeners an ambiguous goodbye as Mitski begins an era without the confines of the music industry.