Mitski – Nothing’s About to Happen to Me
Mitski‘s previous three records set a very odd stage. Be the Cowboy, her breakthrough record after years of being an adored sad-girl poet who clearly had more going on than that title would imply, was a critical darling and rightly so, being her sharpest set of lyrics married to her most adventurous and playful set of compositions yet. Laurel Hell, the highly-anticipated followup, felt somehow diminished; there isn’t necessarily an easily named aspect of the record that felt like a stumble, but for the first time it seemed that she had not advanced on herself in her career thus far. So, a break ensued, followed by The Land Is Hospitable And So Are We, a record that did not challenge Be the Cowboy‘s supremacy in her catalog but saw a wise pivot to more orchestral country arrangements that offered an exciting new vista for her to explore to pleasing results. After an arc that jagged, filled with so many twists in so few a set of records, a new album seemed tantalizingly open-ended.
So mark my beyond-pleased experience when, on pressing play on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me for the first time, I was greeted first by the country-inflected singer-songwriter material of “In a Lake,” feeling like a Kris Kristofferson deep cut, moving right into “Where’s My Phone?”, a piece of experimental rock that feels like a tamer version of Cardiacs especially with the noisy carnivalesque outro. Within but two tracks, Mitski confirmed an awareness of those two pillars of her catalog prior to this, Cowboy and Land, a pleasing marriage of imagery to boot. The rest of the album follows a marriage of those two aesthetics, with swooning pedal steels and those strange art rock turns in the harmonies that feel downwind of her time in short-lived prog metal group Voice Coils prior to her solo career taking off.
There is a gentleness to her poeticism, a deliberate simplicity evocative of Kurt Cobain’s similar work, with just enough cleverness in the turns of phrase to tell you the simplicity is purposeful and not a result of a dulled pen. “Maybe tomorrow night, the cat’s will be nowhere in sight / but I’ll be glad to know they’re out following their hearts delight” concludes “Cats,” painting just a tremendously beautiful domestic image in singer-songwriter color. Previously, her lyrics had a tendency on occasion to slip into being too clever for their own good, whereas here, that tendency is extinguished. It seems age and experience has brought Mitski a finer eye for balancing the sobering details of common life against those sweeping theatrical outbursts that mark the necessity of art and poetry.
Nothing’s is a concept record of a sort, following the headspace of a single character in a single house in a single failing relationship. The narrative is at once unobtrusive and highly structural; each of these songs feels emotionally of a piece, elaborating on each other’s edges, while being spare enough on explicit narrative that it doesn’t feel like a makeshift musical. The topic of failing relationships and the solacing fixation on dying instead of facing a humiliating world after love fails is not new ground for Mitski, but suddenly her writing feels so much more Joan Didion than Rupi Kaur, brimming with Raymond Carver keenness and the so-fitting lyrical nod to Virginia Woolf’s suicide in “Dead Women.”
She described elements of this character she inhabits as pitiful, but I would disagree with her; we may be entering an era, or maybe just saturn-returning, where explicit vulnerability toward love and its wounds is seen as mawkish and self-effacing, but this is the cost of truly cherishing relationships. We are not permitted a world where our relations to one another are meaningful and then never demand humility or the sacrifices of self-image toward devotion to another. Self-help culture’s cancerous linguistic overflow may have encouraged us to cut communication and disappear quietly if anything causes us pain, but the character Mitski paints is both braver and more honest. She loves the person leaving, truly, is willing to sacrifice for them and doesn’t know why this doesn’t seem to matter. Any who have been in failing love, real love, know this sting.
The two-fer of “Instead of Here” into “I’ll Change For You” feels closer to Joni Mitchell, from the country and jazz arrangements to the vocal performance to the unselfconscious lyricism. Music about strength is all well and good, but we rarely need art to gird us when we already feel strong. That she makes a record so committed to that immiserating part of love, where the warm glow in the heart burns even in your lover’s absence, even as night falls and cold comes, feels more emotionally necessary and confrontational than songs about being solid after love leaves. That latter affect as we all know is a put-on; no one who is strong proclaims their strength, while facing a new world without someone you truly love is always a heartache, the cost of the game. Add to this the shocking maturity of closing track “Lightning,” especially its Brecht-and-Brel evoking closing lines of “I can hear the song of my death / singing for the lightning to come, / calling to the thunder,” and you have a record I can confidently call her strongest in her career thus far. For marrying the very best aspects of Cowboy and Land and then sharpening her poeticism into something that can survive on the page and out of the song, it’s hard to imagine feeling any other way about the record. How she follows this is anyone’s guess.
Label: Dead Oceans
Year: 2026
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Mitski : Nothing’s About to Happen to Me
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