A School Project Turned More: Mitski's Second Album

SCORE: 92/100

I've loved Mitski for years upon years now, and yet the thought of listening to her fills me with this sort of harrowing sadness no other artist gives me quite like this. Her music manages to be so heartbreakingly devastating it's hard not to fall in love with her style, and she does it without seeming too overly dramatic or like she is doing too much with her music; it's just right.

'Retired from Sad, New Career in Business' is much less lo-fi than her debut album 'Lush', with her stunning vocals being backed by a 60-piece student based orchestra that gives the project a hugely lively, almost hopeful sound with glimpses of something sweeter between the more gut-wrenching songs. 

Mitski used this as her senior project while studying at the State University of NY at Purchase, where she was studying for her music career. She self-released the album and made music videos for every song within it, with each of the songs and their video counterparts following a consistent story created by Mitski, who wrote the entirety of the album's lyrics on her own.

The album feels theatre-esque in nature, and the resulting sound is something that feels both full-fledged and stripped at the same time, with the compositions of each song building and growing into something much larger by the time they close out and lead into the next piece of the story. 

It's rare that an album makes me feel so emotional, but this one did exactly like that. It manages to be both optimistic and entirely crushing at the same time, and Mitski pulls both off so well it's astounding.