Mitski: review of Nothing’s About to Happen to Me – searing melodic sadness from the best songwriter of her generation | Mitski

toLast month, Mitski released “Where’s My Phone?”, the first single from her eighth studio album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. The rambunctious alternative rock is a more robust take on the lo-fi noise of her third album Bury Me at Makeout Creek, while UK listeners may detect a certain Britpoppy sway around its beat, ending with a guitar solo so blatantly distorted that it sounds as if something is wrong with the broadcast. It was accompanied by a video showing the singer as a rural mother wearing a hijab, trying to protect her family from the outside world’s attention with increasing violence: the milkman is attacked, and her daughter’s would-be fiancé is beaten bloody. It’s both funny and disturbing. There are references to Rapunzel and Gray Gardens and American Gothic by Grant Wood and Shirley Jackson We’ve Always Lived in the Castle – a series of intentional isolation.

The visuals set the tone for the rest of Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, an album that never strays far from its creator’s longing to disappear; To be, as she put it instead of here, “where no one can get.” In the opener “In the Lake,” she extols moving to the city from a small town, not in search of bright lights and excitement, but in search of mystery, as a way to blur your history: “Some days you go a long way to stay down memory lane.” On “I’ll Change for You,” she chants about bars — “such magical places” — precisely because of their anonymity: “You can be with other people without ever having anyone.” And in the rules, you’ll “get a new haircut… be someone else.” All of this is set to beautifully crafted music that splits the difference between alternative rock, country-infused vocal lamentation and grander ambition: the brilliance of Grammar lies in the disparity between the desperation of its lyricism and the densely orchestrated easy-listening support of early ’70s fun.

Mitski’s relationship with celebrities is fraught — enough that her Wikipedia page has a section titled “Opinions on Her Fanbase” — and it probably wasn’t helped by her 2023 single My Love Mine All Mine, which was dreamily underrated but has sold 4 million copies in the US and made the top 10 everywhere from the UK to the UAE. Indeed, the album’s yearning for anonymity and isolation seems to have less to do with fame than a failed relationship, as its eerie silence and sense of desperation are painted in excruciating detail on “Cats” and “If You Leave.” This central theme also seems timely and relevant no matter the state of your love life: Over the past 12 months, who among us hasn’t been at least temporarily gripped by the desire to isolate oneself completely, to disconnect from the incessant barrage of terror that is the news cycle?

One thing the world won’t have in 2026 is a drought of self-tested millennial singer-songwriters, publicly co-opting their angst for support that falls somewhere between pop and indie, rich with references to the music of the late ’60s and early ’70s. But that rarely seems to matter over the course of Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, simply because Mitski is better at these things than her peers: stronger on the melodies, more adept at creating atmosphere that seeps from your headphones into your bones, and possesses a way with the lyrics where the lines — “I’ve been trying to start trying to be like someone you still love / Maybe if I could, you would actually do it” — are balanced by a biting sense of humor that undercuts any accusations of navel-gazing narcissism.

Dead Women is an alternately terrifying and funny film, with its author portraying herself as a ghost, looking equivocally at friends and former lovers who rewrite the story of her life, quite incorrectly, in heroic terms. Meanwhile, that white cat is having an existential crisis about “where I belong” by seeing said cat marking her territory in her garden: “It’s supposed to be my house, but I guess, according to the cats, it’s now his house.”

The 35-minute album is a thought-provoking, laugh-out-loud, laugh-out-loud listen. There’s a lot of unhappiness here — Mitski cited Eric Carmen’s miserable 1975 soft rock hit All By Myself as a touchstone — but what emerges from said unhappiness is exhilarating and strangely rewarding. If misery loves company, then Mitski’s company is worth keeping.

“Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” will be released on February 27th.

Alexis listened this week to

The Scratch – Pulling Teeth (with Kevin Rhyault)
It sounds terrible in theory – Irish traditional music meets heavy rock – but it packs a punch in reality, enhanced by Kevin Rioult’s raucous rapping.