There’s a funny meme that captioned a photo of Mitsky: “Therapists hate ’em.” Their songs make you wonder what love, happiness, and stability are all about. Over the course of six albums, the 31-year-old singer has become one of America’s top young singer-songwriters, expressing his emotions with dry entertainment or genuine pain. Her songs are filled with vignettes of pictorial symbolism. Fusing roaring indie rock with ambient folk and plenty of music in between; their chords are never resolved like you might think, more like life. Maybe therapists hate her because she puts them out of a job—her music is not only disturbing, but often uplifting, liberating, and compassionate.

Turns out she was in therapy herself. “I love therapy! Talking to someone who you don’t feel like a burden because that’s their job—it really makes all the friendships easier,” she laughs. “You speak up and put it into words; it sets things straight. In America, there’s still this notion that you’re only good if you’re happy. I hope we get away with it.”

In November, we met in a very posh hotel in London, sitting in the elite smoking section for maximum ventilation: “I should have a cigar,” she said. Wearing a mask, she occasionally opens her eyes to emphasize this.

Mitsky’s outspokenness has made her a cult figure among millennials and Gen Z (generations that so ardently reject emotional repression), but her new album, Laurel Hell, should propel her into the mainstream. It’s an instantly catchy record, but complex songs keep coming to mind. The touchstones for her writing are “Scott Walker, Vangelis, George Morold, Iggy Pope in Berlin Years, Arthur Russell, and a secret reference we probably don’t want to reveal: Hall and Oates”.

She recalls her deliberately naive way of thinking while producing: “When was everyone hopeful and everything was happening and everything was fine? The ’80s bubble! That feeling of being able to have a lot of money. I wanted to convey that, just to get out of the fog of the pandemic.” Many of the songs were written in or before 2018, so she and her producer-player Patrick Hyland “had time to think about every detail, good and bad. Focusing for long periods of time without limits is not good for mental health.”