When he’s not writing music as Mr. Mitch, Miles Mitchell runs a record label (Gobstopper), raises his growing family in southeast London (they welcomed a daughter last April), and holds down a full-time job. When venues are open, he’s one-quarter of the team behind Boxed, one of the most quietly influential club nights that London has produced in the past decade. In 2020, he released two new EPs, including a collaboration with his two young sons (proceeds went towards their video gaming gear), as well as two Bandcamp collections of older, mostly unheard material. All the while, he continued work on Lazy, his third album.
It should be clear that Mr. Mitch is not lazy. But that doesn’t stop a cascade of self-help books, hustlers’ highlight reels, and “carpe diem” Instagram personalities from making him feel like he’s not doing enough. It’s a feeling most people on social media will recognize, one exacerbated by the extra time many of us spent at home and online over the past year. Mr. Mitch writes his music in stolen midnight hours, while the rest of us are doomscrolling until our eyelids give in; when life delivers a new challenge, he writes through it. So it is with Lazy.
On his previous album, 2017’s Devout, Mitchell explored his feelings around fatherhood; 2018’s Primary Progressive EP was his way of working through his own dad’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. Where both of these albums addressed relatively concrete subject matter, Lazy is evasive, flitting about in a sort of mental ecstasy of indecision and unknowns. Musically, the result is a broad scatter of sounds and moods, most of which have a foot firmly planted in clubland: “Black Majik” is a lumbering, acid-dipped Jersey club plod; “Moving Up” offers a lo-fi take on disco. He duets with R&B samples over shining synths on “Proud,” then drops pummelling techno dancehall on “What They Want.” It sounds like the best kind of club set—when the DJ captures the faith of the crowd and then rewards them by darting to newly imagined places.
“Did We Say Goodbye?” is Mr. Mitch’s love letter to shuttered clubs. An evocative music video layers clips from tour life with tweets about what people miss about going out, but the track itself avoids the emotional clichés in favor of a more personal recollection. The drama of the song’s title belies the hopeful lilt in the lead guitar sample; boxy drums and a winding synth line that drifts in near the end conjure memories of indistinct snippets heard through bathroom cubicles. These are small, melancholic touches, and they land delicately. On the title track, veteran grime MC Manga Saint Hilare offers a pep talk—“Just because I love myself a lot, what, now you think that you hate me?”—that’s intimate in its scrappiness.
Dogged by uncertainty last spring, Mitchell thought about abandoning the album. It didn’t feel right. His unease leaks through on the distorted synths of “Sleep” and in the stomach-churning kicks of “Make Time” (where anxious bleeps and high-strung synths hint at the track’s origins in the Primary Progressive era). Mostly, though, Mr. Mitch finds succor in music. When he released “Daydream of Me” (then titled “Daydream of You”) early last June, the song was accompanied by an epigraph: “When the world feels like it’s collapsing around you, sometimes you just need three minutes to realign yourself. I daydream of you.” It doubles as a mantra for Lazy, an understated tonic to the overwhelming everyday.
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