Mitski says her eighth album is about “a reclusive woman in an unkempt house. Outside of her home, she is a deviant; inside of her home, she is free.” Thematically and musically, it continues in the same vein as her last album, 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, which set literary evocations of small-town disaffection to sweeping, orchestrally-augmented indie folk. For an artist who’s always been both ambitious and restless — from undeniable peaks like the searing indie rock of her 2016 breakthrough, Puberty 2, to more complex offerings like 2022’s synth-pop-inscribed Laurel Hell — this is the first time she’s stayed so surely in one place, musically or lyrically. For her, the little pink houses of our decaying American mythology are still haunted enough to give her a few more good short stories.
“I’d never live in a small town/I’m too slow to learn all the rules,” Mitski’s forlorn heroine intones on the album-opening “In a Lake,” as a banjo and accordion provide gentle, languid accompaniment. The song contrasts that sense of constriction with the easeful feeling of floating by yourself out on the water. But any pastoral sentimentality is upended quickly by the harried rocker “Where’s My Phone,” the most straight-ahead song on the record. Most of the album finds her in a modernized countrypolitan setting, with strings, steel guitar, and, occasionally, horns adding the appropriate texture to studies in serene loneliness like “Cats” and “Instead of Here,” where a line like, “Excuse me/I’ll be opening my box of my old friend misery” seems to imbue solace as much as desperation. Things get darker in “Dead Woman,” a dreamily grisly imagining of romantic betrayal, murder, and memory — even if we’re left to assume its drama is probably playing out in the narrator’s fevered mind rather than on the local news.
Mitski has never been afraid of thinking big, and there are moments here where the floorboards groan a little. “The White Cat” is tumultuous bombast where staring down the neighborhood stray cat becomes a spooky reckoning. “It’s supposed to be my house/But I guess now according to cats/Now it’s his house.” Dogs step into the spotlight on “Charon’s Obol,” a sweet, moody country tune with backing vocals off an Fifties Elvis record in which a pack of pups holds a somber funeral vigil outside the home of their dead owner.
Mitski is at her best in this album’s more elementally human moments. “If I Leave” unsettles the nostalgic settings for the kind of big, slow, distortion-heavy guitar epic she gave us on her 2016 classic “Your Best American Girl,” as Mitski delivers desolate lyrics with a cathartic sense of menace. And she closes the record with “Lightning,” which goes from Mazzy Star to My Bloody Valentine as the music swells around lyrics that welcome a violent baptismal storm. “Could I come back as the rain,” she asks. It’s primal highlights like this where the sad beauty and rough freedom at the heart of Nothing’s About to Happen to Me begin to merge with the eternal.
