From her experimental approach to song structures to her fearlessness in tackling taboo topics, Mitski has, up to this point in her career, displayed a fierce individualistic streak. The comparative lack of that instinct is, despite a handful of compelling indie-pop songs, a large part of why the singer-songwriter’s Laurel Hell is something of a letdown.
The trouble starts and largely ends with the album’s production. Mitski and longtime collaborator Patrick Hyland aim for a classic ’80s pop sound—and they’re mostly successful, with gated drums and retro synths complementing Mitski’s expressive, reverb-heavy vocals. Over the last decade, everyone from Taylor Swift to Japanese Breakfast has saturated the music world with an ’80s revivalist style landing somewhere between Talking Heads, the Human League, and Madonna. But Mitski’s adoption of the decade’s tropes on Laurel Hell comes across as muddled and at times mismatched to her songwriting.
On “The Only Heartbreaker” and “Love Me More,” Mitski embraces the over-the-top cheesiness of ’80s dance-pop hits a little too thoroughly. Conversely, tracks like “Everyone” and “There’s Nothing Left for You” are attempts at atmospheric drone music, but rendered with lightweight synths, they just come across as static dirges.
This issue in particular is disappointing considering the spectacular job that Mitski and Hyland did on 2018’s Be the Cowboy, where songs would start one way and abruptly change gears, packing so many weird, exciting ideas into two- or three-minute songs that they could be blissfully overwhelming. The songs on Laurel Hell are short too—the album clocks in at a mere 32 minutes—but cover only a fraction of the territory.
These songs don’t change much from start to finish, and often seem to just peter out before they really get going, without anything surprising happening (with a few exceptions, like the Nintendo-inspired synth break near the end of “The Only Heartbreaker”). Opener “Valentine, Texas” seems like an attempt to mimic the structure of Be the Cowboy’s “Geyser.” Both songs start with a stark organ drone before introducing fuller instrumentation halfway through, but where “Geyser” explodes, “Valentine, Texas” just plods.
Fortunately, “Heat Lightning,” an ode to insomnia, is more successful at capturing the creativity of Be the Cowboy’s compositions and arrangements, opening with cold “Venus in Furs”-like guitars and slowly becoming more rhythmic and melodically inviting. By song’s end, it even enters R&B slow-jam terrain. While it’s conventionally structured by Mitski’s standards, “Working for the Knife” is similarly compelling, with its heavy guitar and synth groans accenting the singer’s despondence over waking up to find herself a meaningless cog in an oppressive capitalist machine. On the flipside, “That’s Our Lamp” offers some much-needed pop flair to close out an often dreary sounding album.
By far Laurel Hell’s most novel and memorable cut is “Should’ve Been Me.” Largely shedding the rest of the album’s ’80s trappings, it’s caustically jaunty, bouncing along as Mitski recounts being the victim of infidelity. But she reacts with an emotion one would never expect in this kind of song: understanding. “When I saw the girl looked just like me/It broke my heart the lengths you went to hold me/To get to have me,” she laments, blaming her own emotional unavailability for her partner’s straying: “You wanted me but couldn’t reach me.” It’s a fascinating, fresh take on relationship dynamics that makes much of the rest of Laurel Hell sound boilerplate by comparison.
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