You Need to Hear "Burn It All", Elizabeth's Nihilistic New Torch Song

Since her first record with Totally Mild, Elizabeth Mitchell has been writing songs about the impossibility of selfhood and love coexisting. How are you supposed to become yourself––become a real person that you know and understand––when you're also thinking about someone else? Totally Mild's second album, Her––which was one of our essential records of 2018 so far––dealt with those feelings as interior thoughts, and the tumult of that record reflected it. "Burn It All", Mitchell's debut solo single as Elizabeth, takes the same ideas and recontextualises them in the heat of an argument between partners. The result is a hauntingly spare torch song that showcases Elizabeth's flawless, elastic voice and heartbreakingly caustic lyrics.

"Burn It All"'s coup is in its refusal to mince words: "I disappear when I'm with you," Elizabeth moans, and it hurts. ""Burn It All"," Elizabeth says, "is about that time in a relationship where it feels easier to give up and forget you were ever in love, rather than try to work it out." Fittingly, her delivery is slow and languorous, capturing the heated and drawn-out agony of heartbreak perfectly. Then, suddenly, it ends, the reverb cutting out for the track's devastation-ridden final lyric: "Burn it all, pretend that we never knew." It's an appropriately painful ending––maybe selfhood and love can't coexist.

"Burn It All"'s video, which we're premiering today, was directed and produced by Elizabeth with Xanthe Dobbie, and shot and edited by Dobbie. "We shot the video on my birthday and it’s a Cruel Intentions-style romance between me and a blue convertible," says Elizabeth of the video. "Even a relationship between woman and car is tumultuous; full of desire one minute, detached, angry and confused the next." Watch "Burn It All", and find Elizabeth's BIGSOUND dates, below:

Elizabeth @ BIGSOUND 2018
Tue 4th Sept: JBCM Party @ Bloodhound Bar, 5:50pm – 6:20pm
Wed 5th Sept: Official Showcase @ Black Bear Lodge, 8pm - 8:30pm
Thu 6th Sept: Our Golden Friend Day Party @ Black Bear Lodge, 2:45pm – 3:15pm
Thu 6th Sept: Official Showcase @ Laruche, 10:40pm - 11:10pm
Fri 7th Sept: Biground (songwriters in round) @ Blute’s time 3:00pm – 3:30pm

Find Elizabeth on Facebook and Instagram.

Shaad D'Souza is Noisey's Australia & New Zealand editor. Follow him on Twitter.