MitskiThe new Mitski album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, is a character study, “a rich narrative whose main character is a reclusive woman in an unkempt house”.
There’s sex and death, heartache and loss, secrets and memories, cats and dogs, and couplets so acidic you might wince. “She gave her life so we could have her in our dreams,” Mitski sings, “she gave her life so we could fuck her as we please.”
It’s a fictional narrative, but there are themes and images that clearly speak of the artist’s own preoccupations: a desire for anonymity, struggles to fit into prescribed social roles, and, on Dead Women —the standout jam that gives us the above rhyme, the feeling that people identify more with the idea of you than the reality.
The 35-year-old indie icon has been doing this from the beginning: using storytelling as her creative voice and pop songs to interrogate far-reaching notions of womanhood, artmaking, and societal stereotypes.
Long before she found unexpected fame and obsessive fandom, cutting her first records at music school in upstate New York, she was writing songs like Wife, from her 2012 debut LUSH, where, as if a crestfallen heroine of a Victorian novel, she sings from the perspective of a spouse struggling to conceive a required male heir.
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
Yet, as records like 2013’s Retired from Sad, New Career in Business, 2014’s Bury Me at Makeout Creek, and 2016’s Puberty 2 took Mitski from studenthood to ascendant artist—filled with songs where sad financial realities crush young dreams—responses seemed to miss the distance between songwriter and sentiment, art and artist.
“I don’t think people realise how gendered it is to portray my music as something that flows out of me without much refinement,” Mitski lamented, to me, in an interview for her fifth album, Be the Cowboy. “‘Oh, she’s writing direct from her diary, she’s so raw, she’s so confessional!’”
With that album, Mitski explained, she was conscious of “making it clear that I am creating something, I am writing something, I’m thinking deeply about it.” From that point, the clarity of artistry and the playing with artifice were rendered clearly on each successive album.
As 2022’s Laurel Hell cemented her status as star—debuting in the top 10 in Australia, the US and UK—and 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We took her into realms of choir-bedecked grandeur and expressionist composition, it was clear that these weren’t journaling playlists, but considered, full-length explorations of the fragmentary nature of identity; her experiences of public/private dissonance echoing the universal strangeness of living in very-online times.
These themes are still at play in Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. A portrait of a lonely, alienated woman makes for obvious echoes of these themes, and feeds into the greater feeling that all of Mitski’s albums are part of one continuum, artistic siblings in conversation with each other.
This is heard not just in the lyrics —typically dark and funny, condensing smart theme and big emotion into pop-song brevity— but in the music, all of which carries echoes of past LPs.
Standout jam If I Leave feels like kin to those Makeout Creek/Puberty 2 breakout days in the way it plays with quiet/loud dynamics, uses distorted guitars as a compositional tool. Riffs and orchestration bounce off each other amidst the fuzz and fury of Where’s My Phone? Cacophony evokes an unravelling psyche in That White Cat, whilst its contrapuntal choral voices stitch the deep past to the recent past, noisy indie-rock bumping up against the evocative orchestration of The Land is Inhospitable; those last two songs, for those charting all of Mitski’s lyrical tics, both using the word ‘bug’.
Beyond insects, there are cats aplenty on the album, which literally wears them on its sleeve. Marc Burckhardt’s evocative cover painting finds a serene white cat, Bowie-like eyes of two different colours, reclining serenely, as a teeth-bearing ginger cat jumps in from out of frame.
This mixture of stateliness and uneasiness speaks to both theme and sound, but also literalises the LP’s third track, Cats. Its title isn’t out to evoke history’s worst movie musical, but a pair of rescues who linger therein, “our two cats” who sleep by their narrator’s side, providing reassurance in contrast to potential romantic upheaval.
Affairs of the heart recur, but there’s never anything so simple as a love song, nothing as generic as exploring a breakup. “Everywhere you go makes your heart ache/where you’ve done enough walks of shame,” Mitski sings, on folkie opener In a Lake. “Some days you just go the long way/to stay off of memory lane.”
In that tune she sings, of life in a small town, “you gotta write your book early/or it gets written up in your place”. This evokes the act of authoring narrative, the friction between owning your story and having other people tell it.
That sentiment directly connects to Dead Women, the song which sits at the centre—and the heart—of the album. As syrupy pedal steel drizzles ring out golden and orchestration—then modular synthesisers—build up, Mitski quietly, perhaps resignedly croons of a life being hijacked by others; a kind of horror-movie, or true crime saga, that makes its audience complicit in its horrors.
“Would you have liked me better if I’d died/so you could tell my story the way it ought to be?” the track opens, with great provocation. The album is full of verbal barbs and embittered words, carefully laid amidst the bright choruses and warming instrumentation like a series of traps.
It makes for an album at once welcoming and disorienting, where the familiar is glimpsed from unfamiliar angles, and the feeling of darkness slowly builds. It’s a work of mood building and world building, from a deft storyteller and reluctant star.
Nothing's About to Happen to Me is out now via Dead Oceans.
