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Jan 12, 2022 By Mark Redfern

Mitski is releasing a new album, Laurel Hell, on February 4 via Dead Oceans. Now she has shared the album’s fourth single, “Love Me More,” via a surreal video for it featuring a puppet version of Mitski and more. Watch it below.

Mitski had this to say about the song in a press release: “As ‘Love Me More’ was written pre-pandemic, lyrics like ‘If I keep myself at home’ had different meanings than what they would now, but I kept them on the album because I found that some of the sentiments not only remained the same, but were accentuated by the lockdown.

“‘Love Me More’ went through the most iterations out of all the songs on the album. It’s been too fast, too slow, and at some point, it was even an old style country song. Finally, I think because we had watched The Exorcist, we thought of Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ and experimented with floating an ostinato over the chorus. As we steadily evolved the ostinato to fit over the chord progressions, we began to hear how the track was meant to sound.”

Christopher Good directed the “Love Me More” video, which was filmed in Kansas City in December 2021. He previously directed Mitski’s “Nobody” video.

Previously released singles from Laurel Hell are “Working For the Knife” (which topped our Songs of the Week list), “The Only Heartbreaker” (also featured on our Songs of the Week list), and “Heat Lightning” (which again was on our Songs of the Week list).

Many of the songs on Laurel Hell were written during or before 2018. The album was finally finished being mixed in May 2021. Mitski’s longtime producer Patrick Hyland worked with her on the album throughout the pandemic and it’s the longest she has ever worked on an album. Over the course of its creation, Mitski said in a previous press release that the album evolved “to be more uptempo and dance-y. I needed to create something that was also a pep talk.”

Of the lyrical themes on the album, Mitski said: “I needed love songs about real relationships that are not power struggles to be won or lost. 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.”

Mitski’s last album, Be the Cowboy, was #2 on our Top 100 Albums of 2018 list and landed her on the cover of our print magazine.

Read our 2019 cover story interview with Mitski on Be the Cowboy.

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