Text: Al Horner – Photography: Tom Jamieson (Styling by: Lucy Upton-Prowse)
With her devastating songs about romantic longing, the singer-songwriter has rewritten the indie rulebook, garnering a legion of dedicated fans along the way.
Now, she’s speaking out against the exploitation that defines the music industry, imagining a future in which the artist is no longer a product.
MITSKI MIYAWAKI IS REMINISCING about a missing person. “She was someone who simply wrote her feelings, and didn’t think about how her narrative was being conveyed,” she recalls, describing a talented 20-something who’s “long gone now”.
This missing woman looked like Mitski, sounded like Mitski, and even released an album under the Japanese-American artist’s name: 2012’s Lush, a plaintive, piano-led wander through a sadness best described as biological. On songs like ‘Liquid Smooth’ and the hypnotic ‘Wife’, she sang about the kind of loneliness that pervades every molecule. It introduced the world to an artist who’d become one of the biggest indie acts on the planet, lauded by Iggy Pop as “the most advanced American songwriter that I know”. But Mitski no longer feels like that person.
“She was ambitious and single-minded about getting to be a musician,” explains the 31-year-old, warming her hands around a cup of herbal tea in a London hotel restaurant, almost a decade to the day of Lush’s release. A moment passes as Mitski chooses her next words carefully. “But maybe she didn’t quite understand what that meant – what the price was at the door.”
It’s a cold night near Embankment, where Mitski is promoting her latest album, the elegant, ’80s pop-inspired Laurel Hell. She wrote the record as a “pep talk” to herself, and to a world in spiral. “I felt like we needed some infusion of possibility, some sense of things happening again,” she says of the LP, written between 2018 and 2020 with a despot in the White House and, later, a pandemic at our doors. Its pulsing keyboards and danceable rhythms concealed a quiet darkness. “When there’s a sad message under a veneer of danciness and happiness, you almost trick people into going on that journey with you. Like: ‘Oops, too late! You’re sucked in!’” she says, laughing. It’s a trick she learned from one of the album’s biggest influences, Swedish pop heroes Abba. “Have you heard ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’? There’s a desperation to those lyrics, but you don’t notice until you really listen.”
Laurel Hell is an album that almost never was. After 2018’s Be The Cowboy, the star was contemplating leaving the spotlight for good. That album had been her
