Songfacts®:

• In assembling tracks for her Laurel Hell album, Mitski endeavored to pen "love songs about real relationships that are not power struggles to be won or lost." This '80s-indebted ballad finds the singer taking the blame for a romance in peril.
• Mitski starts off by crooning:
  
  If you would just make one mistake
  What a relief that would be
  But I think for as long as we're together
  I'll be the only heartbreaker
  
  Mitski is consistently messing up the relationship. "Sometimes you're the one who keeps making mistakes, who's breaking your favorite person's heart," she told Apple Music. "And there's nothing you can do about it because you can't just suddenly be a better person."
• During the second verse, Mitski depicts something deeper beneath the surface; she's the one always looking bad in the relationship because she's the only one revealing herself.
  
  So I'll be the loser in this game
  I'll be the bad guy in the play
  I'll be the water main that's burst and flooding
  You'll be by the window, only watching
  
  Maybe the reason Mitski is the only heartbreaker is that she's the only one trying.
• "The Only Heartbreaker" marks the first time Mitski teamed up with another songwriter for one of her songs: Semisonic frontman Dan Wilson. Her collaboration with Wilson came about because she'd been struggling with the track for ages. "I was just sitting on it forever," she told Apple Music. "I have so many iterations of it. Nothing felt right."
  
  During a co-writing session for other artists with Wilson, Mitski played the tune to him, hoping he could solve the puzzle. "It turned out he's really good," she said. "He helped me solve so many of the problems and kind of lead me out of the labyrinth of it. And yeah, I'm really glad that I took that chance with him."
• Mitski recorded the Laurel Hill album with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland amidst the global pandemic. He played the guitar and percussion on this track, and she the keyboard.
• Maegan Houang and Jeff Desom directed the music video, in which Mitski is the source of a forest fire. The raging inferno eventually burns down the planet.
• Mitski wrote most of the songs for Laurel Hill in 2018 before finishing the album during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The record went through many iterations. "This album has been a punk record at some point, and a country record, she told Rolling Stone. "Then, after a while, it was like, 'I need to dance.' Even though the lyrics might be depressing, I need something peppy to get me through this."
  
  "The Only Heartbreaker" is that "peppy" number. "I needed that Breakfast Club dance-sequence music," she said of the '80s-influenced disco tune.
• "The Only Heartbreaker" climbed to #1 on the Adult Alternative Airplay dated March 12, 2022, giving Mitski her first leader on any Billboard song chart.