Songfacts®:

• "Working For The Knife" finds Mitski singing about being unfulfilled because of the expectations placed on her. She uses "the knife" as a symbol for feeling cut down by the responsibility of being one of indie rock's foremost artists.
  
  I start the day high and it ends so low
  'Cause I'm working for the knife
  
  By the end of the day, Mitski feels worn out as she pushes herself to live up to her reputation. She's discovered the creative aspirations of her youth were just a pipe dream. Instead, she finds herself caught on the treadmill of "working for the knife."
  
  "It's about going from being a kid with a dream, to a grown up with a job, and feeling that somewhere along the way you got left behind," Mitski said of the song. "It's being confronted with a world that doesn't seem to recognize your humanity, and seeing no way out of it."
• This is not the first time Mitski has used a knife as a metaphor. On Be the Cowboy's "Blue Light," she sang:
  
  Out there I'm a sharp knife
  
  In that instance, Mitski puts on a front as a well-adjusted woman who is "as sharp as a knife" when she's mixing with others. But when the singer is home alone, she's going crazy trying to find someone to love her.
• Mitski's longtime collaborator Patrick Hyland came up with the synth-heavy instrumentation. Hyland has produced all of Mitski's albums, bar her debut, Lush.
• Zia Anger directed the video, which shows Mitski wandering around the empty corridors of The Egg, a performing arts venue in Albany, New York. By the end of the intense clip, the songstress has worked herself into a manic state as she thrashes and dances around on stage to an empty crowd.
  
  Anger told Crack magazine the idea for the concept was "an artist returns to the cruel stage that gave birth to her… It's all about how hard it is to be traveling somewhere in one's career, and then you get there – or maybe you don't get there – and it's never what you wanted it to be." He continued: "Mitski speaks from this really specific point of view and it allows this access that is not too universal – like, you still feel like you’re part of a secret club, but there is this universality to it."
• When Mitski announced that her concert at New York's Central Park Summerstage in September 2019 would be her last "indefinitely," she envisioned it being her final show ever. After being reminded that she owed her label one more album, Mitski realized she needed to continue to make music for herself, too.
  
  The Japanese-American singer-songwriter wrote "Working For The Knife" toward the end of 2019, detailing her love/hate feelings towards returning to the stage. "What it came down to was, 'I have to do this even though it hurts me, because I love it,'" Mitski told Rolling Stone. "This is who I am. I'm going to keep getting hurt, and I'm still going to do it, because this is the only thing I can do."
• In the line, "I always thought the choice was mine and I was right, but I just chose wrong," Mitski is grappling with the consequences of choices she made when she was younger. The singer elaborated in a Pitchfork interview: "It means a lot of things to me, but to say it simply, it's that you've grown up, you've lived your life, or you've lived your childhood - it's over. Time has passed and you can't take back the choices you made and now you have to live with them. I also think when you're younger, you make all these choices that you don't even realize shape the rest of your life forever and you can't do anything about it."