She’s trying to have it both ways - simultaneously stepping up and retreating - and succeeding at neither. The central conflict here seems to be this: Is this a full-blown bid for pop superstardom? Or is it a subversive spin on the idea of a pop record akin to Mitski’s other work? I can’t tell as a listener, and I’m not sure Mitski knows, either. But the throwback 1980s sheen applied to the songs is ultimately noncommittal. Mitski has said that Laurel Hell went through many iterations - including country and punk versions - before she decided that “I need to dance,” according to Rolling Stone. It feels muddled, as if the author couldn’t decide on an overall vision. As for the album itself, it’s her most overt pop move yet, with another single, “The Only Heartbreaker,” co-written by Dan Wilson, a collaborator of Adele and Taylor Swift and one of the top hired guns in the business.Īnd yet, the question persists: Does Mitski really want to be here? Unlike the bravado she displayed on the preternaturally confident Be The Cowboy, she seems markedly less assured on the follow-up. After that she will join Harry Styles for a short run of stadium concerts in Europe.
The release of Laurel Hill will be accompanied by a three-month international tour of large theaters that launches in about two weeks, and is already almost entirely sold out. Over a mid-tempo shuffle accented with goth-y synths, Mitski croons about a spiritual malaise that one could easily apply to her own career narrative: “I used to think I’d be done by 20 / Now at 29, the road ahead appears the same.”Īpparently, Mitski has opted to go the “actually go out and present it” route.
“I just didn’t know whether I would ask the label to take it and keep me out of it,” she said, “or I would actually go out and present it.” The song itself doesn’t resolve this ambivalence. In the Rolling Stone interview, Mitski admitted that she wrote “Working For The Knife” - the first single from her new album, Laurel Hell, due Friday - at the end of 2019, around the time she was reminded of a contractual obligation with her record label to put out another album. She hasn’t quit music, but she also hasn’t demonstrated that she loves it. (Is there a Google Cat app that I am not aware of?)Īll of this has made headlines like “Mitski Had To Quit Music To Love It” not entirely convincing. In at least two of her recent magazine profiles, she declined to give the names of her cats, for fear that this information could be used to track down her personal information. But the success and indie fame she received in the wake of 2018’s Be The Cowboy has exacerbated this reticence. And that seems entirely deliberate, and also understandable given the close readings her songs and press clippings have invited in the past. In interviews, however, she’s enigmatic, prone to giving statements that seem revealing in the moment and then vague once you see them in print. On stage, she is one of the most magnetic and theatrical performers in indie rock, radiating star appeal even when she was playing dingy rock clubs. What should be made of all this? Having interviewed Mitski myself, I know that her interactions with the press can be cordial but distant. Only she has hinted that she might quit at some point in the not-so-distant future. She insisted at the time that she wasn’t quitting, but in recent interviews she confirmed that actually she did plan at the time to quit her music career. In 2019, she announced a hiatus that many fans presumed was a retirement.
#Two steps from hell albums 2019 serial
From Serial Productions and The New York Times comes The Trojan Horse Affair: a mystery in eight parts.Does Mitski really want to be here? The 31-year-old indie star has been sending mixed signals for a while now. Together they team up to investigate: Who wrote the Trojan Horse letter? They quickly discover that it’s a question people in power do not want them asking. Because through all the official inquiries and heated speeches in Parliament, no one has ever bothered to answer a basic question: Who wrote the letter? And why? The night before Hamza is to start journalism school, he has a chance meeting in Birmingham with the reporter Brian Reed, the host of the hit podcast S-Town. To Hamza Syed, who is watching the scandal unfold in his city, the whole thing seemed … off. By the time it all dies down, the government has launched multiple investigations, beefed up the country’s counterterrorism policy, revamped schools and banned people from education for the rest of their lives. The story soon explodes in the news and kicks off a national panic.
#Two steps from hell albums 2019 code
The plot has a code name: Operation Trojan Horse. A strange letter appears on a city councillor’s desk in Birmingham, England, laying out an elaborate plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate the city’s schools.
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