Last month, Mitski returned with a new single, “Working For The Knife,” one of the best songs of that week, and announced an extensive tour, which is already mostly sold-out. Today, Mitski has announced her follow-up to 2018’s Be The Cowboy: It’s called Laurel Hell and will be out on February 4 — she once again worked on it with producer Patrick Hyland.

“I needed love songs about real relationships that are not power struggles to be won or lost,” she said in a press release. “I needed songs that could help me forgive both others and myself. I make mistakes all the time. I don’t want to put on a front where I’m a role model, but I’m also not a bad person. I needed to create this space mostly for myself where I sat in that gray area.”

Today’s new single, “The Only Heartbreaker,” was co-written with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, who has a long history of working with musicians like Adele, Taylor Swift, and the Chicks (back when they were going by Dixie). In a new interview with Apple Music, Mitski talked about that collaborative process:

This is the first song in my entire discography of however many albums I’ve made where I have a co-writer, and it’s because this song was this puzzle that I couldn’t solve. And I was just sitting on it forever. I have so many iterations of it. Nothing felt right. And right when I was stewing over it, I was actually in LA, doing co-write sessions for other artists. And we had this one day, or I had this one day with Dan Wilson. I had every intention to write for somebody else, but then I just sat down at his piano, and I was like, he’s one of the best, smartest songwriters in the world. Maybe he can help me with this song. And so I brought the song to him, and it turned out he’s really good. He helped me solve so many of the problems and kind of lead me out of the labyrinth of it. And yeah, I’m really glad that I took that chance with him.

Mitski said that the song depicts “the person always messing up in the relationship, the designated Bad Guy who gets the blame It could simply be about that, but I also wanted to depict something sadder beneath the surface, that maybe the reason you’re always the one making mistakes is because you’re the only one trying.”

It comes with a music video co-directed by Maegan Houang and Jeff Desom. Watch and listen below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Valentine, Texas”
02 “Working For The Knife”
03 “Stay Soft”
04 “Everyone”
05 “Heat Lightning”
06 “The Only Heartbreaker”
07 “Love Me More”
08 “There’s Nothing Left For You”
09 “Should’ve Been Me”
10 “I Guess”
11 “That’s Our Lamp”

Laurel Hell is out 2/4 via Dead Oceans. Pre-order it here.