In 2023, Mitski scored her first Billboard Hot 100 hit when My Love Mine All Mine took on a second life online and wouldn’t leave. Three years later, her answer to that kind of visibility is to retreat indoors.
Nothing’s About to Happen to Me was made with her touring band, much of it recorded at home with longtime producer Patrick Hyland, and you can feel the walls in the sound. The drums are close. The guitars arrive like someone stepping into a room you forgot you left unlocked. Even the horns, when they swell, seem to press against the ceiling rather than blow it off.
The album opens with In a Lake, drifting in on banjo, fiddle, and a double bass that moves like careful footsteps. She sings about small-town departures and memory as something you dodge rather than revisit. The arrangement blooms toward the end, full band, full light, then holds there just long enough to make you uneasy. She’s been writing for theatre, and that instinct is all over it. Every entrance is timed. Every blackout feels like a choice.
That theatrical streak runs through I’ll Change for You, which starts as a woozy barroom number, brushed drums and lounge chords, before turning brittle. She sings about changing herself for someone who doesn’t like her with a kind of tipsy dignity, playing it completely straight, no ironic distance, no wink. It’s a weird, uncomfortable song and it works.
Americana threads through much of the record. Moonshining blues on Charon’s Obol. Anglo-Celtic melody meeting Southern strings on In a Lake. Pedal steel weeping in the corner like it has nowhere else to be. On her last album, those pastoral textures felt expansive. Here they feel domesticated, arranged like furniture in a house that hasn’t been dusted in a while.
And it is a house. Lyrically, she rarely leaves it. Cats prowl the yard. Possums rattle around in the attic. Stray dogs, dead girls, crowds at the door. On That White Cat, she watches the neighbourhood cat claim her property with complete indifference. The band pushes harder here, a scrappy near-punk energy that recalls her mid-2010s fuzz, but the fit is uneasy. The song wants to strut and her voice stays inward, and you can feel the two things pulling against each other without ever quite resolving.
Where’s My Phone? barrels in on distorted guitar and a rhythm that swings just enough to throw you off. The solo at the end sounds like the signal is breaking up. She sings about waiting to be saved, then realising no one is coming, and keeps her voice almost bored the whole time, which is what makes it land.
Loneliness has always been her subject, but here it turns almost gleeful. On Instead of Here, she imagines disappearing somewhere unreachable. On Rules, she promises to get a new haircut, be somebody else. The band leans into 1970s soft-rock polish, thick orchestration that does most of the heavy lifting while the lyrics barely hold it together underneath.
Dead Women might be the album’s cruelest joke. She imagines her own afterlife, watching friends and former lovers rewrite her story into something heroic and inaccurate. It’s funny in a dry, side-eye way, and it’s also a pretty sharp observation about how quickly people start mythologising someone once they’re gone, and how much of that is really about the people doing the mythologising.
The album’s strangest trick is how controlled it feels while describing unravelling. Horn sections flare up in In a Lake like a vaudeville flourish. Bossa nova rhythms shimmer under a song about drunken self-abasement. Gothic melodrama and small domestic detail sit side by side. You picture a woman in a bowler hat under a spotlight, then the light snaps off and she’s alone in an unbrushed housecoat.
Not every experiment lands cleanly. A few of the more band-forward tracks strain against her natural economy, and you notice it. She’s at her most convincing when the door stays closed and the camera stays tight, when a single image carries the weight. A kid waiting for a ride. A cat on a front step. A bar where you can be with other people without having anyone at all.
She avoids the obvious narrative about fame, even as it hums in the background. The album never names the glare directly. Instead, it builds a set. A house at the end of a dirt track. Leaves piling up outside. Music drifting from room to room. If you want to read it as a response to sudden pop ubiquity, you can, but she’s not going to confirm it for you.
Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is out today via Dead Oceans.
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