Mitski currently enjoys something close to cult status in the world of indie rock, is especially popular with a younger audience and has already had one or two TikTok hits. Why is that Alongside her theatrical way of performing songs, it is above all her emotional directness that makes Mitski so singular. At times, it feels as though her charged lyrics are flying straight from her head into our ears, entirely unfiltered. As a lyricist, she writes memorable lines through a mixture of humour and seriousness – lines that also happen to work on TikTok. One example from her 2016 masterpiece Puberty 2: »I will go jogging routinely / Calmly and rhythmically run / And when I find that a knife sticking out of my side / I’ll pull it out without questioning why.« Lines like these are so powerful precisely because they do not seem to have been overthought.
Nothing's About To Happen To Me Black Vinyl Edition
The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We Black Vinyl Edition
On her eighth album Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, Mitski sketches the figure of a withdrawn woman living in a cluttered house, keeping countless cats and once again rushing from room to room in panic because, amid all the confusion, she has misplaced her phone – hardly the image one would instinctively associate with a celebrated indie star. These unusual character studies, which Mitski then wraps in playful indie-rock songs such as »Where’s My Phone?«, work so well partly because they also reveal something about her ambivalent relationship to her own success. She longs for calm. But more on that in a moment.
Musically, the album can be understood as a continuation of its predecessor The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We (2023), since Mitski once again draws inspiration from country music. The record opens, accordingly, with rustic acoustic guitars, accordion and banjo. But then a car horn suddenly enters, and the opener turns into a jazzy metropolitan chaos, accompanied by the words »In a big city you can start over«. From the outset, then, the album makes clear that it reaches further than its predecessor. Mitski draws on various aesthetics from her earlier work while also moving into new terrain.
At moments, on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, she even wonders whether things might not be better if she were already dead…
Again and again, her complex vocal melodies stand out – melodies that Mitski and her long-time producer Patrick Hyland then shape into accessible pop songs. What is striking is that Mitski did not in fact grow up with rock music and originally studied composition. You can hear that across the whole record – not least because she never seems to refer to other indie-rock acts, at least not directly. One might almost say that her greatest influence has always been herself, which suits the pure, elemental quality of her lyrics. Mitski does not move within pre-existing traditions so much as operate as a wholly instinctive musician. That is something that particularly appeals to younger listeners.
There is already enough going on in the mind
The line already mentioned – »In a big city you can start over« – is somewhat misleading, because Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is above all concerned with isolation and retreat into the private sphere. A later line is far more representative of the album: »I’m where nobody can reach«. Mitski sings here about that same woman mentioned above, who would most like to stay at home with her cats; she sings of looking out of the window and watching the cars go by. It seems, then, that the musician is longing for a quiet life within her own four walls.
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In the highlight »I’ll Change For You«, Mitski sings that she would completely change herself for her romantic counterpart, if only that person would stay with her at home. Although this is not, of course, to be taken literally and is intended to signal a certain tragedy, statements of this kind would have been unthinkable on earlier Mitski albums, where she more often defined herself as a woman who would never fully fit into her surroundings and who would prefer to break free. Something of that theme also comes through in »Where’s My Phone?«: the point is not so much that she has lost her phone as a longing for freedom and quiet beyond this constant state of availability. Mitski has a deeply ambivalent relationship to her own success, and now longs for anonymity, for separation from the rest of the world. At moments on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, she even wonders whether it might not have been better if she were already dead…
Yet for Mitski, isolation and adaptation do not necessarily seem like bad things, but rather like routes of escape. To return to the album title: the fact that nothing is happening to her appears to suit Mitski rather well. Because she has realised that so much is already going on inside her head that she does not become bored even when home alone.
