If you couldn’t tell, Paste is very excited for the forthcoming Mitski album Laurel Hell (Feb. 4, Dead Oceans), which we recently included in our Most Anticipated Albums of 2022 list. Today (Jan. 12), Mitski shares another single off the album, “Love Me More,” alongside a terrifying video.
“Love Me More” is a clear ode to the drama of ‘80s pop, featuring building synths and ominous pianos that urge toward a thrilling climax. Mitski yearns for a love as satisfying and fervent as hers as she sings, “I need you to love me more / Love me more, love me more / Love enough to fill me up.”
Speaking further on the song itself, Mitski said:
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.
The accompanying video was directed by Christopher Good, known for directing the video for her hit “Nobody.” Like a somehow even more twisted Alice in Wonderland, Mitski finds herself in a nightmarish sequence of events featuring creepy dolls, intimidatingly large pianos and crows.
Below, watch the video for “Love Me More,” and keep scrolling to revisit “Working for the Knife” and “Heat Lightning,” plus Mitski’s 2015 Daytrotter session. You can preorder Laurel Hell ahead of its Feb. 4 release here.
