7 products
Laurel Hell
Regular price $27.00 Save $-27.00We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment,
let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe.
But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious
than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist
in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform
the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into
the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the
Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched
her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national
division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility
influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for
this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of
the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one
that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror,
and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped
away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory
realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before
2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span
of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded
amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her
longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global
pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms
and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change
when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written
a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability
and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit
within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and
ultimately, love.
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We - Robin Egg Blue
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00Limited blue colored vinyl LP pressing housed in a slipsleeve. 2023 release. Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what's truly hers, what can't be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. She hopes her album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she's gone. Listening to it, that's precisely how it feels: like a love that's haunting the land." This is my most American album," Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of it's private sorrows and painful contradictions. In this album, which is sonically Mitski's most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. The album is full of the ache of the grown-up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It's a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place - this earth, this America, this body - takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.