When it was released in early February, it debuted at No.5 on the Billboard album charts, above recent releases by Drake, Adele and the Weeknd, and it was that week’s best-selling album in America. That might not necessarily seem enticing, but “Laurel Hell” has been Mitski’s most commercially successful album yet. Mitski insisted that the first single be not a catchy pop song like “The Only Heartbreaker” but the finished version of “Working for the Knife,” with its industrial-tinged synthesizer chords that clank like factory equipment. Sleek, danceable ’80s-pop-inspired tunes coexist with songs like the eerie “Heat Lightning,” which conjures the stirring, dronelike sensibility that John Cale brought to the Velvet Underground. Like those flowers’ siren songs, the record contains some of the most immediately accessible music of Mitski’s career, and some of the most tonally and thematically challenging. She called it “Laurel Hell,” a nickname given to the dense and thorny but deceptively beautiful thickets of poisonous shrubs that proliferate in southern Appalachia. Eventually she accumulated enough of them that she realized - Hallelujah! Goddamn it! - that she was making another album. “Now at 29, the road ahead appears the same/Though maybe at 30, I’ll see a way to change.” “I used to think I’d be done by 20,” it goes. She likened the process to visiting a Korean spa: “I got to go into the metaphorical sauna and sit there a while and feel it and relax.” One of the first new songs she wrote was an introspective number called “Working for the Knife,” which put words and droning chords to her experience of creative burnout. But in Nashville, and eventually in the imposed stillness of the pandemic, she found that she could finally spend entire days writing. When she was touring, her writing process became hurried - a few piecemeal lines or melodic ideas jotted down in snatched moments of downtime.
She would live quietly and relatively cheaply, she thought, writing songs for other artists, perhaps, in anonymity and blissful ignorance of what people were saying about her on the internet.
Maybe she would never make a record of her own again. “I’ve been on non-stop tour for over 5 years, I haven’t had a place to live during this time, & 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.” The next week, she performed the ultimate digital mic drop: She deleted her account. So that June, on her charmingly candid personal Twitter account, she announced that an upcoming date headlining Central Park’s SummerStage would be her “last show indefinitely.” Fans protested so vociferously that she issued a clarification: “Y’all, I’m not quitting music!” she tweeted to her 130,000 followers.
She hadn’t been home in years she wasn’t even sure where or what home was anymore. Ninety percent of her time was spent on administrative tasks and promotional duties instead of writing and performing, the part of the job she truly loved. Mitski (whose last name is Miyawaki, though she doesn’t use it professionally) was wrapping up a long, triumphant tour for her acclaimed 2018 album, “Be the Cowboy.” The music website Pitchfork had named it Album of the Year NPR proclaimed Mitski “the 21st century’s poet laureate of young adulthood” Iggy Pop, on his BBC radio show, called her “the most advanced American songwriter that I know.” She was about to turn 29 and had finally reached the perch of success and stability that she had been working toward for years, but she also felt disillusioned. At the end of the summer of 2019, the indie musician Mitski was on top of the world, and she was exhausted.
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