- Dead Oceans
- 2026
Mitski wanted us to know that it would be over soon. When Mitski toured behind her last album, 2023's The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We, she put together an elaborately choreographed abstract stage show — an odd and beautiful theatrical spectacle where she was all alone on a stage riser, doing performance-art gestures that sometimes verged on physical comedy, while surrounded by a sleek, disciplined eight-piece band, whose members surrounded that riser in a V formation. She was at Merriweather Post Pavilion, a huge pavilion out in suburban Maryland, to play a three-night stand, singing to 20,000 hushed and attentive fans each night. Rather than delighting in the moment, Mitski wanted to reassure is that we would not have to be around all these strangers for much longer.
Late in the show, Mitski told the crowd how happy she was that we had all come out to see her, and she promised that she was almost done. It's an amazing thing, when all these people leave their houses and pay all this money to engage in this kind of ritual. If you're not an especially social person, it can be taxing. I've never met Mitski, but she certainly gives the impression that she's not a live-show person — that she might never find herself at a venue like Merriweather if she didn't stumble into the line of work where all these people were coming out to see her. Maybe it's safe to assume that many of the people in Mitski's fanbase are not live-show people, either. Still, it was funny to hear a figure like Mitski, one of the biggest stars to emerge from the indie-music world in the past decade or so, reassuring a rapt and colossal crowd that she wouldn't take up too much more of their time. It says a lot about who she is and how she sees herself.
Nothing's About To Happen To Me, Mitski's absolute stunner of a new album, is all about that conflicted state of mind — wanting to reach out and connect with the world while also wanting nothing to do with all these other people. Nothing's About To Happen To Me is a concept record, though it never exactly announces itself as one. Mitski spends the album singing from the perspective of "a reclusive woman in an unkempt house," as a press release puts it. Even if the record were a complete work of fiction, that perspective would still resonate with the relative reclusiveness of the real-life Mitski's public profile. But it doesn't really matter whether or not Mitski is singing in character on Nothing's About To Happen To Me. The character may or may not be made-up, but the feelings that she explores are as real as it gets.
Lots of songs on on Nothing's About To Happen To Me end with grand crescendos. Mitksi recorded the album with Patrick Hyland, her longtime collaborator and musical director, and with her touring band. These people are pros, and they know how to achieve orchestral grandeur when necessary. Nothing's About To Happen To Me is a relatively brief and concise album, a shade over half an hour long, and it draws from a bunch of musical traditions — scratchy and discordant indie rock, Nashville country waltzes, smoky-cabaret rumination. A song like the single "Where's My Phone?" leans into the indie rock side of Mitski's catalog, but it grows bigger and weirder until its uh-oh-ohhh climax veers into berserk Broadway circus-music territory. Mitski starts the song demanding to know where her phone is, and she insists that she wants her mind to be "clear glass, with nothing in my head." But "Where's My Phone?" is not the product of a clear-glass mind. It's the sound of a brain spinning in so many directions that it's about to crash.
The songs on Nothing's About To Happen To Me move through lots of different sounds and ideas and feelings, but many of them build up slowly to that same level of freaked-out intensity, and it always works for me. Opening track "In A Lake" starts out as folk music, with accordions and gently plucked guitars and lyrics about the claustrophobia of small-town life, and then everything comes thundering in noisily and chaotically while Mitski sings that in a big city you can start over. The sudden orchestral-crash moment is so beautiful. On the closer "Lightning," Mitski's character imagines dying and then returning as the rain, and it goes from tensely twangy indie rock to surging catharsis. The last line on that song, and on the album, gives me goosebumps: "I can hear the song of my death/ Singing for the lightning to come/ Calling to the thunder/ '…Polo!'"
This is gripping, suspenseful music full of sharp, unpredictable choices, and all of it serves this character study of someone who longs for connection even as she actively rejects it. On "Cats," Mitski sings about being mentally checked out, in the giving-up stage of a relationship: "I’ve been trying to stop trying/ To be like someone you’d still like/ Maybe if I could, you already would." One song later, she describes the terrifying feeling that your partner will be fine without you but you will absolutely not be fine without them: "If I leave, somebody else will love you/ But nobody else could forgive me quite as often as you." The single "I'll Change For You" is mellow, inviting continental jazz about missing someone terribly and knowing that you fucked it all up: "How do I let our love die/ When you’re the only other keeper of my most precious memories?"
Most of Nothing's About To Happen To Me isn't even necessarily about romantic relationships. It's about isolation. It's hard to hear "Dead Woman" within the concept-album narrative when it seems to be straightforwardly about becoming an abstraction in other people's heads, a thing that happens to every famous singer. Mitski starts that song out with a rhetorical question: "Would you have liked me better if I’d died/ So you could tell my story the way it ought to be?" She then envisions that unnamed "you" breaking into her house, strangling her partner, stealing her possessions, and embalming her dead body, imagining the words of her killers: "She gave her life so we could have her in our dreams/ She gave her life so we could fuck her as we please." When that's how you see the outside world, isolation has its advantages.
"Instead Of Here" almost depicts isolation as a higher state of being. Someone comes knocking at Mitski's door, or maybe at Mitski's character's door, and she stays quiet because "I'm not here, I'm where nobody can reach." On "That White Cat," a neighborhood cat comes sniffing around her backyard, and she resists any incursion on her life: "It’s supposed to be my house/ But I guess according to cats, now it’s his house." (The accusatory way that she hurls the word "cats" is marvelous.) "Charon's Obol" is a grim, ghostly vision about Mitski's character's nightly feeding of dogs who once belonged to the girls who died inside the house where she lives. Over softly twinkling pedal steel, Mitski and her backup singers imitate the sad whines and howls of those dogs, a touch that's both weird and transportive.
The phenomenon of Mitski's overwhelming gen-Z popularity is strange and fascinating, but I don't get the sense that it's all that interesting to Mitski herself, except perhaps to the extent that it's made isolation into a more attractive subject for her. I don't think any of the songs on Nothing's About To Happen To Me will fuel Mitski's TikTok numbers, though I didn't think any of her previous records would be as huge as they have become, either. Instead, Nothing's About To Happen To Me feels like a closed-off song cycle, a sui generis work that's only in conversation with itself. Parts of the album draw on the music that Mitski has made across her remarkable career, but it works as its own beautifully crafted object.
It's been strange and exciting to watch Mitksi became so wildly huge — to see an artist go from tiny DIY tours to huge outdoor sheds without ever compromising her vision or pleading for affection. But the real miracle isn't Mitski's fame; it's what she does with it. Nothing's About To Happen To Me is not a victory-lap record. It's a strange and beautiful internal journey. It's too early for me to say whether it's Mitski's best, but it's in the conversation. I'm curious to see how the world receives it. But heard in isolation with all context removed, it'll still be a forceful, evocative, astonishing piece of work. And the best way to hear it is really in isolation — to shut the world out and go on a wild internal journey.
Nothing's About To Happen To Me is out 2/27 on Dead Oceans.
