Songfacts®:

• Mitski vents her frustrations on "Drunk Walk Home," a cathartic song that ends with some primal screaming. It sounds like she's singing about a lover who rejected her, and that might be the case, but Mitski has explained that many of her song are about music and music industry, which seems to be the case here. She was starting to get more attention, and that scared her because she felt like she was being pulled in different directions and forced to make compromises. When she sings, "F--k you and your money," it's probably directed at her record label.
• Mitski was coerced into producing the screams for this song by a rival bellower. She recalled to Rolling Stone: "I'd never screamed in the studio before doing 'Drunk Walk Home,' but it just felt right for the song. I remember I did an initial take of screams and they were pretty tame because I was shy, and then the recording engineer stood up and said, 'Let me try,' and did a set of screams that were better, and I was like, 'Oh, OK f--ker, watch this,' and did the screams on the record. I'm easily coerced by competition."
• An early Mitski track, Mitski was just 23 when she wrote it and 24 when she released it on her album Bury Me At Makeout Creek, her first on a label. Notice she mentions her age in the first lines:
  
  I will retire to the Salton Sea
  At the age of 23
• "Drunk Walk Home" wasn't released as a single but it built a following among the Mitski faithful and became one of her most popular songs and one she usually performs live. The conflict she describes in the song followed her in some form as she got more famous. By 2019, when she was headlining her own international tour and fielding lots of media inquiries, she got really burned out and announced an indefinite hiatus on the last show of the tour. When she returned to action in 2021 she learned that her music had become very popular on TikTok, albeit in 15-second snippets. "Drunk Walk Home" is kind of a litmus test for her fandom - casual fans from TikTok won't know the song but those who have explored her catalog will.