On “Geyser,” the opening track of her brilliant 2018 album Be the Cowboy, Mitski cast music in the role of a temperamental lover. The need for self-expression, she suggested, could be an endless, destructive tango with frustration and epiphany. So, in summer 2019, when Mitski announced she would take an indefinite break from performing, her reasoning followed. “I sense that if I don’t step away soon, my self-worth/identity will start depending too much on staying in the game, in the constant churn,” she wrote on Twitter. “I don’t want to make art like that, especially when you’re offering your valuable time and hearts and money to it.”

Now, Mitski re-emerges with a song that further contemplates this unpleasant conflict, one surely colored by her own experiences with success. On “Working for the Knife,” her desire to create something pure is overshadowed by the realities of modern life. Atop an eerie, austere synthesizer embellished by twinkling piano notes and a tight little guitar riff, she seemingly acknowledges her time away from the spotlight: “I always knew the world moves on/I just didn’t know it would go without me.” Throughout the song, Mitski contemplates the knife—a metaphor for the systems that ensnare us, the expectations of others, our own standards—as if it were a cold object resting in her hands. Though her knife is capable of cruelty, it can carve out a reason to keep living in moments of deep despair. That doesn’t make its twisting hurt any less, however. “I always thought the choice was mine/And I was right, but I just chose wrong,” she sings before reaching a gut-wrenching realization: “I start the day lying and end with the truth/That I’m dying for the knife.”