Four years ago, Mitski achieved the kind of TikTok success that can make or break new careers, and resurrect old ones. She went from critically acclaimed indie darling to a sort of modern teen pop idol at bewildering speed, and while that has sometimes empowered her – see the conceptual, theatrical live show that a bigger budget made possible for her 2024 world tour – she has generally seemed discomfited at best by the intensity of a spotlight she never asked to be thrust into. And it’s this uneasy sense of impending doom that colours her eighth album, ‘Nothing’s About To Happen To Me’.
After the more abstract ruminations that defined her last record, 2023’s ‘The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We’, Mitski confronts the elephant in the room much more directly on ‘Nothing’s About To Happen To Me’, a record that yearns for disconnection while reckoning with the reality of her raised profile. Opening track ‘In A Lake’ sets the tone in that respect, as she romanticises small-town life while acknowledging its impracticalities; elsewhere, she exalts the simultaneous community and anonymity of the bar scene (‘I’ll Change For You’) and pines for isolation on ‘Instead of Here’.
Every Mitski record comes flecked with literary references and the ones here – from Shirley Jackson to Grey Gardens – reinforce a desire for isolation as the record’s central pillar. If all of this sounds self-involved to the point of self-pity, it is worth remembering how adept Mitski is at puncturing her own ego; she is deliciously wry, and in the top lyrical form of her life throughout this record, particularly on the audacious ‘Dead Women’, on which she imagines how she might be inaccurately lionised by her friends after her death.
There’s also no sense of her second-guessing what her expanded fanbase might be expecting from her sonically. This is, without question, the most musically ambitious album of her career, on which the tranquil Americana that defined ‘The Land Is Inhospitable…’ is routinely upended by reinventions both subtle (the influence of ’70s soft rock is palpable on the likes of ‘Rules’) and furious, with thrashing guitar breakdowns that recall 2014’s ‘Bury Me At Makeout Creek’. The latter is especially thrilling on the edgy, frayed-nerve punk of standout ‘That White Cat’, which channels PJ Harvey’s 4-Track Demos; these are moments that feel like the Mitski of old tearing a hole in the space-time continuum to transpose a bit of her old punk spirit onto the present-day pop star.
She gives few interviews these days, and her personal social media presence, once wonderfully sardonic, has been consigned to history, too. This means we must investigate Mitski’s work forensically to get a sense of where her head is at these days, and ‘Nothing’s About To Happen To Me’ suggests somebody who is less a victim of her own success and more somebody coming to terms with it in her own inimitable style: with an open heart and a delightfully morbid sense of humour.
