Beloved indie rock singer-songwriter Mistki has released her new album Laurel Hell and has also shared a video for the song “Stay Soft”. You can listen to the album on all streaming services, and you can view the music video for “Stay Soft” down below.
Music video director Maegan Houang said of the content of the music video, according to a press release: “This video is heavily inspired by Romanticism and paintings and artwork from the Victorian era. Like the lyrics of the song ‘Stay Soft,’ paintings from that era have a gentle quality, but they still evoke a certain feeling of unexplored darkness and danger. I want the audience to feel safe within this fabricated world and then realize that the character Mitski plays is being hunted. The violence lurking beneath the surface emerges, and yet is still transformed into something beautiful via dance. Through the dance sequence, Mitski’s character is able to conquer the violence, but not without irreparable harm to her psyche.”
Mitski herself offered great detail in regard to the writing process and themes of the song, saying, again according to a press release: “‘Stay Soft’ was a more straightforward rock song when I wrote it on guitar, but the darkly sexual lyrics sung in that context felt too heavy and melodramatic. So we couched the depressing lyrics in an inviting dance beat, which is a trick people have used for hundreds of years. The remnants of the original grungy feeling can be heard starting at the instrumental interlude, when the distorted guitar comes in…This song, frankly, is about hurt people finding each other, and using sex to make sense of their pain. This is by no means the correct way to cope with trauma, but it’s a thing people do regardless, and I always want to write songs about what we actually do, so that we don’t feel alone in them.”
Laurel Hell is the singer-songwriter’s seventh album, following on from 2018’s Be The Cowboy. The record was highly anticipated, especially given that in 2019, Mitski announced an indefinite hiatus that seemed at the time to be her final farewell when it came to making music. Thankfully, this was not to be, and she announced that she had changed her mind in early 2020, and that she would indeed be returning to music. You can stream and purchase the new record at this link.
Mitski will be embarking on a North American tour, as well as European and UK tour later this month. Unfortunately for fans just catching wind of this now, both her North American dates and EU/UK dates are completely sold out. In the event that extra tickets do crop up, more information can be found here.
