American singer-songwriter Mitski described her 2012 debut album Lush as a work by “someone who simply wrote her feelings and didn’t think about how her narrative was being conveyed”. This sentiment carries through all her subsequent releases, including her macabre eighth studio album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, released today (27 February).
Mitski is known for her allegorical lyrics about love and lilting vocals. Her popularity on TikTok during the pandemic made her an icon to melancholic young women who’d put on her albums during what they termed “sad girl hour”. Her music combines numerous genres: synth pop, electronic rock, orchestra.
Yet Nothing’s About to Happen to Me sounds the least like Mitski out of her entire discography. The opening song, “Where’s my phone?” (as the title suggests, about someone wondering out loud where her phone has gone) is more rock-centric than her previous music. The song closes with an uncomfortable distorted sound, as if Mitski is pressing the microphone into her lips. The narrative of many of the following songs centres on big houses which recall the rural mid-West. In “Charon’s Obol”, for example, the singer says she “would wake the rest of her nights in that house / Feeding all the hounds at its mouth”, to an acoustic guitar accompaniment and country background vocals.
Only three songs on the album – “Cats”, “Instead of Here” and the closing track “Lightning” – follow Mitski’s usual musical composition: the soft and mellow start, the explosive middle, lyrics full of poetic metaphors. “Lightning” is the most lyrical song on the album: “All hail the rain/ Running like ghosts on the roof/ Running like they’re feeling alive again”.
Mitski’s albums tend to follow a theme. Puberty 2 (2016) is full of longing and discussions of racial identity; the intimate Be The Cowboy (2018) explores loneliness and self-discovery. Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is full of death: “Death said I called, not knowing that I did”, Mitski intones in “Instead of Here”; “Would you have liked me better if I died?” she asks of a fictional lover in “Dead Women” before instructing him, “When you find my love beside me/ Choke him dead for having me”. “While I dream of flying, stab me 27 times,” she sings, made all the more haunting by the gentle cadence of the music.
Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is much darker and more unnerving than her previous albums, in a way that doesn’t always work. Mitski is a quirky performer: at All Points East in Victoria Park in 2024, she joked with fans in between songs and pretended to be a dying dog on stage, before announcing that she needed “to get back into character” for the next song. Perhaps her new album’s title is meant as a statement of reassurance for her teenage girl fans: despite her musical shift, she’s still the same whimsical, “sad girl” artist.
[Further reading: Gorillaz’ The Mountain review: Damon Albarn’s strange formula]
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