Mitski got the gears turning on starting to share a new album a couple months ago, when she dropped “Working For The Knife” and announced a bunch of 2022 tour dates. Then, last month, she officially announced Laurel Hell — which is set for release on February 4, 2022 — and shared “The Only Heartbreaker.”
Now, it’s time for another Laurel Hell preview, as Mitski shared “Heat Lightning” today. The track starts intimately before blossoming into its first hook and then locking into a rhythmic groove for the rest of the song.
Mitski recently spoke about the upcoming album with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, saying, “‘Laurel Hell’ is a term from the Southern Appalachians in the US, where laurel bushes basically grow in these dense thickets, and they grow really wide. I mean, I’ve never experienced it myself, but when you get stuck in these thickets, you can’t get out, or so the story goes. So there are a lot of Laurel Hells in America, in the South, where they’re named after the people who died within them because they were stuck. The thing is, laurel flowers are so pretty. They just burst into these explosions of beauty and I liked the notion of being stuck inside this explosion of flowers and perhaps even dying within one of them.”
Listen to “Heat Lightning” above.
Laurel Hell is out 2/4/2022 via Dead Oceans. Pre-order it here.
