★★★★☆
In ‘Nothing’s About To Happen To Me’, Mitski, for the eighth time, lays bare her anxieties in a thirty-minute compact. A natural evolution of her catalogue, the indie-pop singer-songwriter’s latest studio album unfolds as a devastating self-portrait, wrapped in soft and mellow harmonies, drawing new and old listeners in with her classic mesh of harrowing lyrics and her contrasting soothing tone.
In 2021, she was plunged into the mainstream when hits like ‘Washing Machine Heart’ and ‘Nobody’ gained traction through TikTok trend cycles. In the five years that have passed since, she has made a noticeable effort to step back from the public eye, maintaining a lowkey presence on social media, a retreat subtly echoed in the album’s lead single ‘Where’s My Phone?’, where the device represents the collapse of public and private identity. She sings of losing herself in it (“Where’s my phone?” / “Where’d I go?”) tapping into a hyper-modern sentiment. She employs bolder, heavier elements sonically, heightening the sense of total overwhelm that listeners can relate to in this modern landscape.
The remainder of the album takes a more uniform, traditionally ‘Mitski’ approach, as she returns to her classic deadpan delivery of gut-wrenching lines: in ‘Cats’, she reflects upon the impact of her ex-lover on her identity: “I’ve been trying to stop trying / To be someone you’d still like”. In ‘I’ll Change For You’, she makes a desperate, helpless plea: “‘Cause I’ll do anything / For you to love me again”. The consistent combination of her sweet vocals and the harrowing lines creates a deeply evocative experience throughout her work.
She flicks between the introspective and the extrospective seamlessly. A shining example is in the fifth track ‘Dead Women’ where she muses on the treatment of women more widely, particularly how they might be treated better dead than alive, a cutting, heavy-hitting commentary on misogyny (“If I’d died willing, you’d have taken it nice”).
The theme of death recurs throughout the album, elevating it to a much darker place than its predecessors. This is most prominent in the track ‘Instead Of Here’, where a near-encounter with death is described in haunting metaphors and intricate imagery. This continues right through to the album’s close, in ‘Lightning’, where she proclaims “I can hear the song of my death” - a dark, depressing yet fitting conclusion.
Thematically, the album is unflinchingly bleak. Sonically, it is excellent, a concise, intense re-run from indie-pop’s resident sad girl. Her razor sharp lyricism and genre-fluid compositions, spanning synth-pop, rock and folk, create a dynamic soundscape, one that is as beautiful as it is utterly haunting. ‘Nothing’s About To Happen To Me’ may be Mitski’s best yet: an affirmation of her unique talent of packaging colossal, universal feelings into shimmering soundbites.
Zahra Hanif
Image: ‘Nothing’s About To Happen To Me’ Official Album Cover