Mitski returned with a new single "Working for the Knife," last month, and now she's announced a new album! Laurel Hell, the follow-up to 2018's excellent Be The Cowboy, is due out February 4, 2022 via Dead Oceans (pre-order on red vinyl). "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," Mitski told Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1. "And 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. And 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. And so the thing is, laurel flowers are so pretty. They just burst into these explosions of just beauty. And I just, I liked the notion of being stuck inside this explosion of flowers and perhaps even dying within one of them."
She also told Zane Lowe that it's the "longest album process" she's ever been through, continuing, "a lot of these songs are written, you know, 2018, and then the demoing process started January 2019 before everything. And then I really thought that it would be done sooner. It just, it was really hard to make anything during the pandemic. And so it's just like we started recording May 2020, and then just kept mixing up until May of this year. It just took so long... and this album went through so many iterations. Me and the producer, Patrick Hyland, just kept finding different sounds. At some point, it was a country record. At some point, it was a punk record. And then towards the end, just because we were mixing during the pandemic and I just got this feeling, even though a lot of the songs are sad and this one is, as well, I need something that's peppy, that's this feeling of we are doing well. And I thought, okay, the eighties, eighties dance, right when everyone was in that bubble and everyone was feeling great. Everyone just needed a pick me up, including myself. I just needed something that was like, I just need to dance. And that's where the sound came from."