In 2023, Mitski had an unlikely commercial breakthrough. “My Love Mine All Mine,” her first entry on the Billboard Hot 100, was reappropriated across user-generated content on TikTok, soundtracking over 2.5 million videos. Mr. Beast proposed to his girlfriend with it; a baby was reunited with his airman father to its warming refrain. But the more extravagantly her music is repurposed, the more Mitski dials in. On Nothing Is About to Happen to Me, her eighth and strangest album, she bypasses the scalding emotional intensity of her early work and lands on the edge of the unreal, seeing no one. The music is skilfully marshalled: sober and lucid even while hallucinogenic and deranged.
The album features live, in-the-room instrumentation by the touring band for 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. The lyrics take place almost entirely in a single setting: Mitski’s once scrupulously tidied psychic home, now abandoned to her daydreams and overrun by mold and dust, with possums living in the attic. The house is also literal—the credits note that her primary producer Patrick Hyland engineered it at home—and it serves as the album’s dilapidated container. Throughout the record, Mitski’s narrator is harried by stray cats, the dogs of dead girls, and crowds intent on embalming her and auctioning off her belongings. She strains to hold on to her memories: longing to backstroke forever with her absent lover still beside her, devising increasingly maniacal ways to preserve him, and ultimately slipping toward madness, where she begins to fantasize about her own death.
Increasingly, Mitski has been drawn to theater, one of the last vestiges of in-person, ephemeral experience, where meaning resists degradation and the fourth wall seals her world in place. She is currently writing music and lyrics for a stage adaptation of The Queen’s Gambit, and the instrumentation on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me reflects that parallel work, as she draws her band toward gothic pantomime. While she performs a good deal of self-referentialism—the theatrical lounge music of her 2012 debut Lush (“I’ll Change for You”), the anxious fuzz of Bury Me at Makeout Creek (“Where’s My Phone?”), the sophisticated emo of Puberty 2 (“If I Leave”)—the new album largely feels like a domesticated continuation of its predecessor’s pastoralism.
As she gained more visibility over the past few years, she’s tended more toward the sounds of Americana. She pulls from rural forms, drawing on moonshining blues for “Charon’s Obol” and cross-hatching Anglo-Celtic ballad influences with Southern American traditions as banjos and fiddles play alongside double bass on “In a Lake.” Unlike earlier records, where pastiche functioned as comedic contrast, every element here is in aesthetic agreement. The scenes are distinct and tightly formalistic. The absinthe reverie of “I’ll Change for You” is backed by bossa nova lounge, as Mitski sings about the magic of being drunk at a bar. The deranged, grandiose finale of “In a Lake” is backed by a full horn section. It feels like an image of madness: a lady in a bowler hat and tuxedo leotard twirling her baton on a spotlit stage, suddenly cut away to reveal a woman with unbrushed hair rocking back and forth, alone.
Loneliness, always a complex theme in Mitski’s work, here takes on a gleeful new valence. The album recalls the domestic nightmares of Shirley Jackson’s stories, where houses isolate their inhabitants only to intensify their sense of identity. The house on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is as fully realized as set design. You see it clearly: a large abode covered in leaves, 200 miles down the dirty track, a white cat on the front step. The focus on architecture and space feels like a further outgrowth of Mitski’s musical theater work, as she builds out her visuals with dramatic clarity and showmanship. “The lights all around you/The dark safe inside,” she sings on “In a Lake” with smokeless stage diction: wielding hamminess and vaudeville as instruments in themselves. She stands alone, aware of her isolation and even energized by it, as her stagecraft fills the moldering, empty rooms with charged anticipation.
Not every song is so crystalline. The rollicking, band-leading Americana of “That White Cat” strains against her natural strengths; it’s a lane artists like Neko Case command through sheer force of presence, and here the fit feels flimsy. The album is strongest when it leans into Mitski’s most comfortable and durable mode, the self-effacing love song. “I’ll do anything for you to love me again,” she sings, drunk and self-consciously pathetic on “I’ll Change for You.” In a post-empowerment age of songwriting that treats romantic abasement as a badge of relatability, it is no longer so daring to catalog one’s most humiliating impulses. But Mitski—who so often draws from the well of romantic delusion—remains the form’s greatest practitioner. She avoids trite confession, writing in strange, lightly magical images. “I’m loitering outside/Watching all the cars passing by/Like a kid waiting for my ride,” she sings, a perfectly stinging tableau. She delivers these songs with great restraint, never opening her door, letting the sadness sit plain.
