Mitski has shared a new music video for ‘Stay Soft’, a track that appears on her just-released album Laurel Hell. The clip is directed by Maegan Houang, who previously co-directed the visual for ‘The Only Heartbreaker’. Watch it below.
“This video is heavily inspired by Romanticism and paintings and artwork from the Victorian era,” Houang explained in a press release. “Like the lyrics of the song ‘Stay Soft,’ paintings from that era have a gentle quality, but they still evoke a certain feeling of unexplored darkness and danger. I want the audience to feel safe within this fabricated world and then realize that the character Mitski plays is being hunted.”
Of the song, Mitski said:
‘Stay Soft’ was a more straightforward rock song when I wrote it on guitar, but the darkly sexual lyrics sung in that context felt too heavy and melodramatic. So we couched the depressing lyrics in an inviting dance beat, which is a trick people have used for hundreds of years. The remnants of the original grungy feeling can be heard starting at the instrumental interlude, when the distorted guitar comes in.
This song, frankly, is about hurt people finding each other, and using sex to make sense of their pain. This is by no means the correct way to cope with trauma, but it’s a thing people do regardless, and I always want to write songs about what we actually do, so that we don’t feel alone in them.
Out now via Dead Oceans, Laurel Hell includes the previously released singles ‘Working for the Knife’, ‘The Only Heartbreaker’, ‘Heat Lightning’, and ‘Love Me More’. Read our review of the album here.
