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“You stay soft, get eaten — only natural to harden up,” Mitski sings on this sleek but deceptively vulnerable pop song, as her voice, fittingly, oscillates between icy cool and wrenching ardor.

The only defense is to harden up and hit back.

A disco march laced with firm piano chords and blippy synthesizers carries her through “Stay Soft” as she counsels, “Open up your heart/Like the gates of hell,” then declares, “You stay soft, get beaten/Only natural to harden up.”

“If it’s not set in stone, it’s hard to fix. You can’t come back. You can’t do things soft and come back a year later and say, we’re going to harden up.”

“We’ve got to kind of harden up, we’ve got to get gritty, we’ve got to be tougher to score against and be the best version of ourselves,” Bennett said.