On Repeat: Mitski Builds Her Own Towering Inferno In The Only Heartbreaker
Tristan Young @talltristan
Perhaps Mitski thought it was time someone finally at least tried to dethrone Phoebe Bridgers. Perhaps Mitski thought the concentrated grandiosity of her last album, the towering Be The Cowboy, had finally started to subside in our collective ear drums and pathos. Either way, at last, Mitski has announced her new album, the cool as hell- and ominous- sounding Laurel Hell. With that she has also released a new single The Only Heartbreaker. Mitski has a talent for taking maximalist pop (when she’s not in her bucolic and isolated folk mode) and peppering it with, if not asymmetrical, than distinctly atypical flourishes. It makes much of her work such a pleasure of unexpected melodic tangents. This track is a touch more linear but trades in deftly insurgent escalations that keep you on your toes just as much. The intro flare up of snares and high hats sounds suspiciously like Maniac by Michael Sembello and shortly after neon 80s synth drench the rhythm without a hint of irony but a great deal of audacity. Clearly Mitski is processing some things but the way she does so is fascinating, especially in the first line. “If you would just make one mistake, what a relief that would be”, is a phrase rich with interpretational promise. She looks at angles of love and its attendant trauma from strangely hypothetical and even subtly academic levels. This is not to suggest that her take on something as abstract and overwhelming as love is antiseptic or anodyne. Rather that she has exhumed its impacts and implications with such a fastidious depth that the extents of her ruminations are engrossingly expansive. While themes of melancholic heartache are as ubiquitous in music as anything, Mitski is often not concerned with universality, rather she sings from an acutely insular context, focusing on granular details that could only apply to her- that’s what often makes her performance so compelling. Instead of generalities that have yielded generations of forlorn frustration for artists to belt out, she takes distinctly introverted stances on love and rejection but renders them through a stadium sized theatricality. That energy is matched by dizzying eruptions of synth and percussion, blossoming with fidelity and hysteria in equal measure. As the instrumentals continue to spiral out of control from their own intoxicant mania, Mitski retains a firm stoicism that almost casually reinserts itself. While there was a tonal synchronicity earlier, the contrast towards the conclusion makes for an incongruous but indelibly alluring audible texture. For a song about the dissolving of love into the ether, it sounds like Mitski is building something more imposing than ever.