Last month, Mitski launched The build’s My Cell phone?, the main single from her eighth album Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. Its raging alt-rock is a more tough take on the lo-fi fuzz of her third album Bury Me at Makeout Creek, while UK listeners would perhaps perhaps detect a obvious Britpoppy swing about its rhythm, and it ends with a guitar solo so jarringly distorted it sounds as if one thing is depraved with the coast. It was accompanied by a video that featured the singer as a scarf-wearing rural mom, making an attempt to protect her family from the attentions of the commence air world with rising violence: a milkman will get attacked, her daughter’s possible suitor is overwhelmed bloody. It’s both droll and unsettling: there are references to Rapunzel, Grey Gardens, Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Shirley Jackson’s We Beget Always Lived within the Castle – a litany of the wilfully isolated.
The visuals build the tone for the remaining of Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, an album on which you’re by no method some distance from its creator expressing a longing to recede; to be, as she locations it on Rather then Right here, “where no one can attain”. On opener In a Lake, she extols shifting to the town from a little town, no longer looking out out for figuring out lights and pleasure, but obscurity, a strategy of obliterating your delight in history: “Some days you staunch tear the prolonged intention to protect off memory lane.” On I’ll Switch for You, she hymns bars – “such magic areas” – precisely attributable to their anonymity: “You probably would perhaps perhaps perhaps even be with varied folks without having anybody in any appreciate.” And on Tips, she’ll “discover a brand new haircut … be somebody else”. All right here’s build to beautifully crafted music that splits the adaptation between alt-rock, nation-infused acoustic lamentation and grander ambition: the brilliance of Tips lies within the disparity between the hopelessness of its lyric and the thickly orchestrated, perky, early 70s easy listening backing.
Mitski’s relationship with celeb is fraught – sufficient that her Wikipedia page has a portion ominously headlined “views on her fanbase” – and was perhaps no longer helped by her 2023 single My Like Mine All Mine, which was dreamily understated but sold 4m copies within the US and made the Top 10 in each build from the UK to the UAE. In point of reality, the album’s craving for anonymity and solitude appears to be like to own less to raise out with repute than a failing relationship, its awkward silences and sense of desperation sketched in painful ingredient on Cats and If I Leave. That central theme also appears to be like properly timed and relatable despite the tell of your love life: accurate thru the final three hundred and sixty five days, who hasn’t been no longer decrease than temporarily been gripped by the flee to diminish yourself off solely, to disconnect from the unremitting barrage of alarm that constitutes the news cycle?
One part the area isn’t struggling from in 2026 is a drought of self-analyzing millennial singer-songwriters, publicly picking at their neruoses to a backing that sits someplace between pop and indie, prosperous with references to music of the gradual 60s and early 70s. But that scarcely appears to be like to topic while Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is playing, honest attributable to Mitski is higher at these items than her peers: stronger with melodies, more skilled at organising atmospheres that seep out of the headphones and into your bones, possessed of a intention with lyrics where affecting traces – “I’ve been making an attempt to launch making an attempt to be love somebody you’d peaceful love / Maybe if I would perhaps perhaps perhaps also, you already would” – are balanced out by a mordant humour that undercuts any accusations of navel-observing narcissism.
Tiring Females is alternately horrifying and hilarious, its creator picturing herself as a ghost, having a glimpse on equivocally as company and lightweight lovers rewrite the story of her life, solely incorrectly, in courageous phrases. That White Cat, meanwhile, spins an existential where-raise out-I belong disaster from the behold of acknowledged cat marking out its territory in her backyard: “It’s purported to be my home, but I negate, in accordance to cats, now it’s his home.”
The album’s 35 minutes are variously intention-upsetting, wrenching and lol-inducing listening. There’s a lot of unhappiness right here – Mitski has talked about Eric Carmen’s disconsolate 1975 gentle rock hit All By Myself as a touchstone – but what’s emerged from acknowledged unhappiness is strangely scrumptious and rewarding. If danger loves company, then Mitski’s company is payment retaining.
Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is launched on 27 February.
This week Alexis listened to
The Scratch – Pullin’ Teeth (ft Kevin Rheault)
Sounds bad in thought – Irish traditional music meets heavy rock – but works to bracing raise out with out a doubt, further bolstered by Kevin Rheault’s raw-throated rapping.