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You can find Mitski’s eighth studio album “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” tucked somewhere in the mind’s cluttered attic, gathering dust between the day’s devastating monotony and the night’s delicious desperation. As an artist that is uniquely capable of capturing the bare-naked human experience, it is no surprise Mitski stuns with yet another musical treasure.
Unlike some of her earlier albums that felt more like episodic vignettes orbiting shame, desire and self-erasure, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” feels deliberate in its pacing. The album does not explode so much as it simmers, tracing the slow accumulation of thoughts that spiral when nothing outwardly catastrophic occurs. In that suspended space between crisis and stagnation, Mitski details a slow descent into a house where every room holds a slightly darker version of the same thought.
The art-pop Americana album — released over two years after her first Billboard Hot 100 song “My Love Mine All Mine” catapulted her streaming success — adds a narrative arc to themes already illustrated throughout her discography, lending a more mature, “lived-in” voice to the intimacy she has authored since her debut over a decade ago.
The story begins with the track “In a Lake,” introducing a narrator who yearns for the private solitude of a big city compared to the uncomfortable visibility of a small town. The lines “And in a big city, you can start over / The lights all around you, the dark safe in the sight,” paired with a poignant crescendo, took me all the way back to her 2012 debut album “Lush,” when she sang “I should move to a brand new city / And teach myself how to die,” in the song “Brand New City.”
Instinctive avoidance and its subsequent isolation aren’t new motifs in Mitski’s work, but 14 years later she has managed to paint loneliness in a new light, making it feel inviting and warm — almost like the start of a familiar cycle. Anyone who habitually retreats into mad seclusion knows the next step is panic.
The anxiety begins to set in on the next track, “Where’s My Phone,” a loud and chaotic plea for clarity. The accompanying video shows Mitski in what she has deemed the Tansy House, an eclectic yet suffocatingly cluttered maze filled with overwhelming stimulation. Mitski has purposefully simulated a panic attack before, most notably in “Nobody” from “Be the Cowboy,” but this time it feels more like a frantic search for relief than a paralyzing weight.
The relief, it seems, is a type of connection rarely experienced between people. The third song on the album, “Cats,” juxtaposes the dull ache of waiting for a relationship to end with the comfort of cats. It seems simple, even silly, to write a song about cats, but the beauty of such a quiet yet reliable attachment is exactly the type of deep love Mitski describes so eloquently within a restrained narrative.
While “Cats” establishes that she will passively wait for her loved one to leave, “If I Leave” reveals why she won’t do it herself. We begin to see glimpses of the darkness behind the staying as Mitski lists the people in her life who could never understand her pain as adequately as the very person who is exhausted by it.
Taken at face value, the song is about a woman too sad to leave her lukewarm partner. But the track is immediately followed by “Dead Woman,” written from the perspective of a murder victim.
At this point in the album, Mitski is waiting for her partner to leave, knowing she will be alone in the Tansy House. She cannot reasonably blame them, so her dark fantasies curated from isolation become an outlet.
Unable to leave, she reimagines herself as already gone. She wants to die, so she pictures her loved one wanting her dead. She is angry that the one person who understands her still cannot withstand the depths of her despair, so she pushes further into loneliness until the image of their love warps beyond recognition.
I was reminded of the song “I’m Your Man” from the 2023 album “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” which Mitski described as written from the perspective of her toxically masculine ego.
The masculine preemptively resigns and invites death as punishment, “No one will ever love me like you again / So when you leave me, I should die / I deserve it, don’t I?” while the feminine spitefully waits to be killed, believing only her corpse could make up for the burden she caused by being alive, “Then embalm me up ’cause you’re hosting the viewing / Saying, ‘She gave her life so we could have her in our dreams’ / ‘She gave her life so we could fuck her as we please.’”
The next track, “Instead of Here,” begins “Right as I dip a toe in the abyss,” with Mitski retreating further into herself, taking solace in the thought of death to the sound of a melodic, dreamy soundtrack. We see just how comforting the feeling is in the lines “So excuse me, I’ll be opening my box / Of old friend misery, my secret treat / To feel like myself again.”
Her partner having left, Mitski grapples with the loss in “I’ll Change for You” and “Rules,” the latter a jaunty, almost childlike counting song. Her energy builds in “That White Cat,” in which she officially shifts from dipping her toe in the abyss to yelling into it, belting, “What do you hold onto?”
The answer, as before, is her cat. The white cat — presumably shown on the album cover — has now taken over her house, as cats do. Life’s meaning comes from the frustratingly mundane as she goes to work maintaining the familiar ecosystem of wasps, possums, bugs and birds in the Tansy House.
Mitski ends the album looking upon a frightening rainstorm in the song “Lightning,” once again reciting her familiar calls to death: “If I’m dark, all the better / To reflect the moonlight / If I mourn, all the better / To behold the sunrise.”
Mitski does not outrun her darkness. She has spent her entire career rearranging it. Rather than offering catharsis, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” closes where it began: In a state of suspended crisis. In a world where nothing happens, the real drama is internal, cyclical and inescapable.
This album will certainly haunt my playlists just as Mitski haunts the Tansy House.
Reach Chloe Waskey at entertainment@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
