Mitski and Broods Bring on A Load Of Heartbreak

Mitski and Broods both release new songs today with the central theme of Heartbreak. The Broods track is simply called Heartbreak while Mitski is The Only Heartbreaker.

Yes, we’ve got heartbreak in spades for you today. Here’s the lowdown on Mitski and Broods:

Mitski made her bold return last month, presenting ‘Working for the Knife’. Today, Mitski announces Laurel Hell, her new album, out February 4th on Dead Oceans, and unveils a new single/video, ‘The Only Heartbreaker.’ Laurel Hell is 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. “I accept it all,” she promises. “I forgive it all.” It cements Mitski’s reputation as an artist who possesses the power of turning our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. “I wrote what I needed to hear. As I’ve always done.”

Following the release of Be the Cowboy, one of 2018’s most praised albums, and Pitchfork, New York Magazine and more’s Album of the Year, launching Mitski from cult favorite to indie star, she ascended amid a fever of national division. The grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit, as expressed in ‘Working for the Knife,’ a song that was a touchstone in creating the overall feel of Laurel Hell: “I start the day lying and end with the truth / That I’m dying for the knife.” Be the Cowboy was driven by personas of female strength and defiance that, however compelling, amounted to the musician “putting on different masks.” Like the mountain laurels for which 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. “I got to a point,” Mitski admits, “where I just knew that if I kept going this way, I would numb myself to completion.”

Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, Mitski began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. “I needed love songs about real relationships that are not power struggles to be won or lost,” she explains. “I needed songs that could help me forgive both others and myself. I make mistakes all the time. I don’t want to put on a front where I’m a role model, but I’m also not a bad person. I needed to create this space mostly for myself where I sat in that gray area.”

The songs that resulted embody that space. New single ‘The Only Heartbreaker,’ co-written with Dan Wilson, and the first such song in her discography, pairs soaring pop swells with deceptively straightforward lyrics whose sincere refrain turns ironic as it depicts “the person always messing up in the relationship, the designated Bad Guy who gets the blame. It could simply be about that, but I also wanted to depict something sadder beneath the surface, that maybe the reason you’re always the one making mistakes is because you’re the only one trying.” Mitski sings: “So I’ll be the loser in this game // I’ll be the bad guy in the play // I’ll be the water main that’s burst inflames // You’ll be by the window only watching.”

‘The Only Heartbreaker’ video, co-directed by Maegan Houang and Jeff Desom, presents the bewildering experience of Mitski’s first time being filmed almost entirely in front of a green screen. Houang comments, “The worst pain I’ve experienced is when I’ve fully understood the pain I’ve caused another. It’s one of the hardest parts of being human, that no matter our intentions, we’ll inevitably do something hurtful to our fellow man, if not someone we love. In this case, the harm Mitski enacts in the video is to the world. It’s unstoppable and destructive, but worst of all, she doesn’t even want it to happen. She’s a stand-in for humanity as we collectively do so little to save ourselves and our planet.”

Mitski wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, and the album was finished being mixed 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.” The album as a whole evolved “to be more uptempo and dance-y. I needed to create something that was also a pep talk.” Mitski explains. The tension that emerges between her refined but plaintive lyrics and the effervescent 1980s sound is a desperately needed infusion, and the work of a mature artist: an album that delivers nuanced profundity on a current of contagious dance beats. It is irresistible.

Pre-order Laurel Hell

Laurel Hell Tracklist

1. Valentine, Texas
2. Working for the Knife
3. Stay Soft
4. Everyone
5. Heat Lightning
6. The Only Heartbreaker
7. Love Me More
8. There’s Nothing Left For You
9. Should’ve Been Me
10. I Guess
11. That’s Our Lamp

Today BROODS release their new single ‘Heartbreak’ and announce the release of their fourth full-length studio album Space Island on February 18, 2022 – available to pre-order now.

‘Heartbreak’ is a song that embodies a certain enchanted quality as the band delve into complex subject matter. With its serpentine grooves, shimmering textures and synths that conjure a bit of space-age psychedelia, ‘Heartbreak’ fully epitomises the prismatic musicality at the heart of Space Island.

“We wrote this from a place of determination. Determined to learn from the loss of my marriage and keep my heart open in its most tender state. When I say, ‘Let your heart break’, I’m whispering to myself to stay present with the grief and transmute it into empathy. It was a mantra for me when I first separated from my husband. One of our parents would reiterate to me daily at the beginning of my healing,” says Georgia.

Following on from the Space Island Chapter 1 video for ‘Piece of my Mind’, Space Island Chapter 2 is an animated video for ‘Heartbreak’ directed by Dr D Foothead and produced by local producer Alex McCrossin.

Georgia says of the clip, “In the second chapter we step away from denial and into the darker corners of our ‘Heartbreak’. Where the things that hurt the most become a guide back to ourselves. They become the teachers that help us empathize with ourselves, and through that, connects us to a deeper kindness for others. To let your heartbreak is not just a fearless and freeing thing to do, but a selfless act of love as well.”

Space Island is an exploration of grief and all its many dimensions: its unpredictable nature and refusal to follow any linear path, its incredible capacity to bring great clarity and transformation. The album came to life during a period of serious upheaval for lead vocalist Georgia. Having married at the age of 21, she went through a difficult divorce soon after the release of BROODS’ previous album Don’t Feed the Pop Monster (a 2019 effort that led to appearances on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and “The Late Late Show with James Corden”). As Georgia turned to songwriting as a means of processing her grief, she and her brother/bandmate Caleb discovered an unlikely but wholly fitting vessel for that emotional outpouring.

“One thing about the experience of grief is that it makes you feel like you’re a bit out of orbit, or isolated in a very big feeling,” says Georgia. “The more we figured out the strange logic of Space Island, the more the music started to reflect what was happening in the lyrics.”

In sculpting the forward-thinking yet nostalgic sound of Space Island, BROODS mostly worked on their own in their home studio, occasionally joining forces with friends/producers like Leroy Clampitt (Ashe, FLETCHER) and Stint (MØ, Gallant). Crystallized in a gorgeous constellation of sonic details – otherworldly beats, swooning guitar tones, effervescent synth lines – the album emerged from a period of unbridled experimentation that involved abundant use of Caleb’s newly purchased Farfisa organ. Caleb names playfully inventive artists such as Danger Mouse and Gorillaz among his key touchstones in the album’s production. On one of the tracks the duo’s long-time collaborator, Tove Lo, joins in with her luminous vocal work.

The 10-time New Zealand Music Award-winning act who’ve amassed over a billion streams to date, have collaborated with Lorde and Tove Lo, toured with HAIM and Taylor Swift and taken the stage at major festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza.

PRE-ORDER /SAVE/ ADD THE ALBUM HERE

Album Tracklist

1. Goodbye World, Hello Space Island
2. Piece Of My Mind
3. Heartbreak
4. Distance And Drugs
5. I Keep (feat. Tove Lo)
6. Like A Woman
7. Gaslight
8. Days Are Passing
9. Alien

If You Fall In Love