Mitski – Laurel Hell

Her critically beloved latest album, Be The Cowboy, built on the success of 2016's Puberty 2 and transformed her from cult favorite to indie star. Her rise came amid a fevered national divide, and the grind of touring and the pitfalls of increased visibility affected her music as much as her spirit. Like the laurel mountain after which the new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer a tantalizing facade that hides a deadly trap - one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this distorted mirror and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that strip away the masks and reveal the complex and often contradictory realities behind them

She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It's the longest period of time Mitski has ever taken to make an album, and a process that ended in the midst of a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland in the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs "slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seeds to flower" Sometimes it's hard to see change when you're the one causing it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, grief and joy, flaws and transcendence can all have a place in our humanity and be seen as worthy of recognition and, ultimately, love.