Mitski - Laurel Hell review: A strong return for this fame-shy singer

The Japanese-American musician may find her success uncomfortable - but she still sounds great
Ebru Yildiz
David Smyth3 February 2022

Today the London band Black Country, New Road release their new album while also losing the services of their singer, Isaac Wood, who has quit the band due to mental health struggles. It sounds as though the return of Japanese-American musician Mitski Miyawaki was by no means assured either. Growing critical acclaim led to lofty status on numerous album of the year lists for her last release, Be the Cowboy, an arena tour supporting Lorde, and a viral TikTok hit (even though she’s never used the platform) for her song Nobody. But commercial success didn’t sit well.

In 2019 she announced that a concert in New York’s Central Park would be her last live appearance “indefinitely”. She tweeted: “It’s time to be a human again,” and deleted her social media accounts. “I had found that in order to survive the music industry, I had numbed my heart and disconnected from myself,” she said recently. “You have to accept that in the eyes of the world, you’re not a person, you’re a consumer product.”

The hiatus didn’t last as long as expected, however. It seems that not writing music is even less pleasant than writing it. “I cry at the start of every movie/I guess ‘cause I wish I was making things too,” she sings in Working for the Knife, a bleak song that expresses her frustration at the demands of her job. The album’s title, Laurel Hell, refers to a plant that traps you more closely the more you struggle. It’s a worrying metaphor, especially when paired with songs such as Everyone, a funereal synth drone that only slightly approaches melody.

Like the music on its predecessors, however, many songs are short, and the whole thing is barely longer than half an hour. Which makes the times when she sounds energetic and ambitious all the more precious. The Only Heartbreaker is an air-punching blast of Eighties-influenced synthpop that could be a smash hit for a singer more inclined to play the commercial game. Stay Soft has an intro that briefly appears to be Come on Eileen. Best of all is Should’ve Been Me, which skips along on a Motown beat before throwing in some grandiose ABBA piano flourishes.

It’ll sound fantastic when she supports Harry Styles at Wembley Stadium in the summer. We can only hope she enjoys it as much as everyone else will.

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