Album review: Mitski’s Pyramid enters silent cinema

Mitski’s second album, Pyramid, is a 2014 electro-pop record inspired by a silent film: its tempos, arrangements and imagery treat music as something projected rather than simply played. The premise is immediately visible in the stark cover and in Mitski’s live presentation, where gestures become tableaux and pauses carry as much weight as lyrics. Yet this is not a nostalgia exercise built from scratched celluloid. The old-film atmosphere gives contemporary songs a strange physicality, as though each track were a frame that might suddenly tear.

Pyramid arrived on Dead Oceans in August 2014, when Mitski was still a relatively new voice beyond her cult following in the United States and Japan. Its surface could initially resemble the sleek side of indie pop: clean synth lines, compact verses and hooks that arrive before they have explained themselves. Underneath sits a more volatile band record, with live drums, guitars and handclaps driving songs that often pivot from tenderness into theatrical panic. That mixture is the album’s real subject—control giving way to feeling.

The result is compelling but never frictionless. Some of the cinematic gestures announce themselves too clearly, and a few songs feel more like components in a production than fully inhabited worlds. Even so, Pyramid offers something valuable: the sound of an artist testing how much identity she can place inside a carefully designed frame without letting the frame become a cage. Its strange confidence explains why the record feels less like a period piece than a vivid performance happening now.

Cinema in a borrowed dress

The silent-film influence is clearest in the black-and-white logic of the presentation. Mitski dresses songs in visual cues: a stance, a glance, a room seen from too far away. The 1928 silent film The Crowd provides a direct visual reference point because its photography turns anonymous city life into mass emotion, yet the album resists making a single literal quotation. More broadly, it draws on the era’s appetite for melodrama, close-ups and exaggerated body language. Even without seeing the staging, Pyramid’s songs sound choreographed.

That approach makes the title more than mood. A pyramid suggests an imposing structure built from simple geometry, and the record stacks clean electronic layers until they become almost architectural. Patrick Hyland’s production lets individual sounds remain legible: a bass pulse under a minor-key melody, a drum fill placed like punctuation, a vocal harmony entering from an unexpected angle. The drama comes from arrangement rather than bombast. On “Everybody Wants to Love You,” the repeated emotional demand is compressed into a short, nearly monochrome miniature, while “Wing” opens outward with physical motion.

The electronic engine under the scenery

The synth-pop pulse is clearest in “I Bet on Losing Dogs,” which establishes the central bargain: risk, affection and the suspicion that love may be another losing bet. Its electronic heartbeat sounds sleek, but the live arrangement refuses to stay smooth. “A Pearl” then places small, precise musical objects—muted guitar, keyboard colour, careful percussion—around a song about emotional value. These details reward close listening. They also mirror how Mitski’s characters see romance, turning relationships into objects to inspect, prize or lose.

The bigger gestures arrive in “Wife,” where Mitski’s voice is repeatedly swallowed by the arrangement before surging back into view. Its visual inspiration, connected to Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, adds another uneasy historical layer to a performance that can look like empowerment at one moment and possession at the next. “Wait” supplies the album’s sharpest tempo shift, its drum-driven refrain turning waiting into agitation. That would be the song most likely to turn a late Sydney club into a moving room, with harbour ferries docked and the last trains approaching outside.

Restraint, noise and the spaces between

Pyramid understands dynamics as a form of storytelling. Quiet passages are not simply gaps; they create the sense that something is about to enter frame. A restrained verse can make the following chorus feel larger than its actual volume, while synthetic textures imitate the crackle and distance of old projection. After the record’s most restless sequences, a guide to a custom relaxation playlist would offer a deliberate change of pace, though it reveals how Mitski makes even restraint feel staged.

The contrast matters because the record sometimes mistakes atmosphere for substance. A repeated synth figure or a theatrical vocal phrase can announce a development before the song has supplied a reason for it. Even then, the sequencing preserves a satisfying arc. The intimate “Roxy” offers a brief change of viewpoint, and “Something in the Way” turns closeness into unease. The title track finally makes the construction explicit: the song reaches upward, then admits how little assurance waits at the summit.

An independent release with something to prove

Pyramid also captured a useful moment in independent music, when a modest release could build a life outside the major-label machinery. In Australia, that ecosystem meant record shops in inner Melbourne suburbs such as Brunswick, where BYO drinks and tangled extension leads were as familiar as the sleeves, alongside community radio, the ABC’s Triple J and word of mouth. Big Day Out, Falls Festival and Splendour in the Grass in Byron Bay offered another kind of distribution, turning a song heard in a tiny room into a shared public sound.

That background makes the record’s scale feel earned rather than inflated. Mitski was not presenting an electronic package designed to erase the singer; she used the genre’s architecture to make her voice seem more exposed. It is the same instinct behind Lady Indie’s mission: giving artists outside the commercial centre a place where their work can be met on its own terms. With import editions priced in Australian dollars, limited independent shelf space and radio gatekeeping, discovery could feel precarious. A release with this much visual identity could easily have sounded anonymous; Pyramid refuses that fate.

A record that still asks for the lights

Not every frame survives scrutiny. A few of Pyramid’s theatrical devices feel borrowed rather than inevitable, and the album occasionally treats atmosphere as a substitute for melodic development. The voice can also be so carefully presented that its emotional volatility is hard to read. These are real limits, but they do not cancel the record’s achievement: it turns electro-pop into a medium for suspense, gives independent singing a physical presence and creates a world that rewards watching as much as listening.

On repeated listening, the most convincing way to approach Pyramid is not as a flawless artefact or a soundtrack to nostalgia. Listen for the record’s live nerve beneath its immaculate surface, and for the way each arrangement seems to change the singer’s position in the frame. Mitski’s 2014 electro-pop set remains specific, restless and emotionally theatrical—a minor masterpiece with the pull of a final reel. The concrete next step is simple: play “I Bet on Losing Dogs,” “Wait,” “Wife” and the title track in that order, without distractions.