Washing Machine Heart
Mitski
"Washing Machine Heart" is Mitski at her most gleefully synthetic: a stuttering programmed beat, a smeared synth bass, a hook built out of the nonsense syllable "baby, though I've closed my eyes / I know who you pretend I am" delivered over what sounds like a Casio possessed. Patrick Hyland's production on Be the Cowboy is deliberately plastic, each element dry and separated, the opposite of the guitar squall she'd been making — and the artifice is the argument. Every song on that record is a small theatrical character, and this one is a woman inviting someone to use her as a receptacle: throw your dirty clothes in, put your heart in me and let it spin. The vocal is chirpy and bright on the surface and completely unsentimental about what it's describing, which is why the song is funny before it's devastating. The image is genuinely original — domestic appliance as metaphor for consensual emotional exploitation — and it lodged in the culture accordingly, soundtracking a million videos by people who understood it instantly without wanting to say why. It works best loud in a kitchen at 1 a.m., dancing badly, briefly not minding the thing it's about.
medium
2010s
synthetic, plastic, dry
American
synth-pop, art pop. theatrical synth-pop. playful, devastating. Stays chirpy and unsentimental on the surface while the domestic metaphor grows quietly devastating underneath. energy 6. medium. danceability 6. valence 6. vocals: chirpy, bright, unsentimental. production: stuttering programmed beat, smeared synth bass, dry separated mix. texture: synthetic, plastic, dry. acousticness 1. era: 2010s. American. Loud in a kitchen at 1am, dancing badly, briefly not minding what it's about.