It’s been a year since Mitski’s sixth studio album Laurel Hell was released into the waiting arms of her loyal followers. There’s a tinge of desperation in the way fans have reacted to this one. A need to see Mitski; hear her haunting melodies and witness her emotionally charged performances perhaps for the last time. After all, Mitski announced in 2019 – after five straight years of going on tour – that she would be taking an indefinite hiatus from music.

For all intents and purposes, Laurel Hell was not supposed to exist. But her record label (Dead Oceans) refused to let Mitski go without cashing out another album, with her nameless fandom (some claimed they were called “nobodies”, after Mitski’s viral TikTok song Nobody. Didn’t really stick) growing larger and more likely to empty their pockets for album merch. Especially if the album meant goodbye.

Although it was literal hell for Mitski to do what she hates the most – be forced to make music – she doles it out with the candour of a woman who crafts from a place of passion and spite. Laurel Hell had a total of 11 tracks and a run time of 32 minutes and 31 seconds, which is already longer than most of her albums. It had a thematic continuity that pays homage to Mitski’s past works. The album’s first track, Valentine Texas, alludes to her previous album Be The Cowboy (2018), which was famous for its unflinchingly intimate retelling of emotional turmoil and heartbreak.

In Valentine Texas, Mitski starts the song with the familiar notes of ominous organ music, the way she’s done so with many other songs. Here, she goes on to sing “I’ll show you who my sweetheart’s never met/Wet teeth, shining eyes glimmering by a fire” and seems to express not only change, but a certain sentiment she often tries to articulate during interviews. She laments that no matter how personal her music seems, we don’t really know who she is. At one point, she even says this in
response to a fan who was screaming how much they loved her at an LA concert. You don’t know me may be too frank, but fair, when you’re constantly pushed to give up bits of your privacy and expected to carry the emotional burdens of thousands of strangers on social media.

In true Mitski fashion, all song titles in the album told us exactly what the song was about while the highly specific lyrics and unique musical arrangement–veering to a different genre for each song–drove the point home. We observe this pattern to a T with the album’s lead single Working for The Knife, which opens with a clatter of percussions and distorted electric guitar riffs before Mitski’s voice joins in a crooning echo. The song, which addresses what Mitski has described to be the mind-
numbing and soulless life that comes with being a “product” in the music industry shares pieces of her suffering with lyrics like “I always thought the choice was mine/And I was right, but I just chose wrong/I start the day lying and end with the truth/That I’m dying for the knife”.

As cold and bitter as it sounds, Mitski’s honesty further endeared her to fans who knew what it was like to be another cog in a corporate machine. Her departure from music, although distressing for many, seemed to be the only logical solution to her misery, and even the most devout of her then- active Twitter cult couldn’t dispute this without sounding unreasonably selfish.

Sure, no one else might ever make music like her. The contrast of her clear, theatre-like voice accompanied by punk rock and synth-pop sounds is rare, and even rarer is her fearless ease of blurring genres together. Who else would sing “I want a love that falls as fast as a body from the balcony/I want a kiss like my heart is hitting the ground/” in a cheerful blend of guitar riffs, bass, and floor drums? Who else would begin a song with a church organ akin to a Phantom of the Opera
number (other than Andrew Lloyd Webber himself), gradually build into a lo-fi, punk rock beat and exclaim “I’m a geyser/Feel it bubbling from below/Hear it call/Hear it call to me/Constantly” to express the enormity of desire? We have and will continue to miss her.

But no one misses Mitski as much as Mitski. Laurel Hell’s tenth track titled I Guess mourns the loss of her deep connection to music. “I guess this is the end/I’ll have to learn/To be somebody else/It’s been you and me/Since before I was me”. The song is a stark contrast to her penchant for making music at the expense of her own life. So far removed from the Mitski at 20 years old who self-produced and released her first album Lush in 2012 despite of her music instructors at New York’s
Purchase College who did not advertise her “experimental sounds.”

On a Twitter post addressing her planned retirement from music, Mitski laid it down plainly. 

“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.”

So we arrive in the now. One year, four months, and twenty-one days after Laurel Hell was released. No recent updates about Mitski have been published or made available online in the last few months, and her continuous absence tells us that she wants to keep it that way. Somehow, it seems certain that this album will be Mitski’s last.

For her sake, I hope it is.