Last month, Mitski released Where’s My Phone?, the first single from her eighth album Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. Its raging alt-rock is a more robust take on the lo-fi fuzz of her third album Bury Me at Makeout Creek, while UK listeners might detect a certain Britpoppy swing about its rhythm, and it ends with a guitar solo so jarringly distorted it sounds as if something is wrong with the stream. It was accompanied by a video that featured the singer as a headscarf-sporting rural mother, trying to protect her family from the attentions of the outside world with increasing violence: a milkman gets attacked, her daughter’s potential suitor is beaten bloody. It’s both funny and unsettling: there are references to Rapunzel, Grey Gardens, Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle – a litany of the wilfully isolated.
The visuals set the tone for the rest of Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, an album on which you’re never far from its author expressing a longing to disappear; to be, as she puts it on Instead of Here, “where nobody can reach”. On opener In a Lake, she extols moving to the city from a small town, not in search of bright lights and excitement, but obscurity, a means of obliterating your own history: “Some days you just go the long way to stay off memory lane.” On I’ll Change for You, she hymns bars – “such magic places” – precisely because of their anonymity: “You can be with other people without having anyone at all.” And on Rules, she’ll “get a new haircut … be somebody else”. All this is set to beautifully crafted music that splits the difference between alt-rock, country-infused acoustic lamentation and grander ambition: the brilliance of Rules lies in the disparity between the hopelessness of its lyric and the thickly orchestrated, perky, early 70s easy listening backing.
Mitski’s relationship with celebrity is fraught – enough that her Wikipedia page has a section ominously headlined “views on her fanbase” – and was possibly not helped by her 2023 single My Love Mine All Mine, which was dreamily understated but sold 4m copies in the US and made the Top 10 everywhere from the UK to the UAE. In fact, the album’s yearning for anonymity and solitude seems to have less to do with fame than a failing relationship, its awkward silences and sense of desperation sketched in painful detail on Cats and If I Leave. That central theme also seems timely and relatable regardless of the state of your love life: over the past 12 months, who hasn’t been at least temporarily been gripped by the urge to cut yourself off completely, to disconnect from the unremitting barrage of horror that constitutes the news cycle?
One thing the world isn’t suffering from in 2026 is a drought of self-examining millennial singer-songwriters, publicly picking at their neruoses to a backing that sits somewhere between pop and indie, rich with references to music of the late 60s and early 70s. But that scarcely seems to matter while Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is playing, simply because Mitski is better at this stuff than her peers: stronger with melodies, more skilled at creating atmospheres that seep out of the headphones and into your bones, possessed of a way with lyrics where affecting lines – “I’ve been trying to start trying to be like someone you’d still like / Maybe if I could, you already would” – are balanced out by a mordant humour that undercuts any accusations of navel-gazing narcissism.
Dead Women is alternately horrifying and hilarious, its author picturing herself as a ghost, looking on equivocally as friends and former lovers rewrite the story of her life, entirely incorrectly, in heroic terms. That White Cat, meanwhile, spins an existential where-do-I belong crisis from the sight of said cat marking out its territory in her garden: “It’s supposed to be my house, but I guess, according to cats, now it’s his house.”
The album’s 35 minutes are variously thought-provoking, wrenching and lol-inducing listening. There’s a lot of unhappiness here – Mitski has talked about Eric Carmen’s disconsolate 1975 soft rock hit All By Myself as a touchstone – but what’s emerged from said unhappiness is strangely delightful and rewarding. If misery loves company, then Mitski’s company is worth keeping.
• Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is released on 27 February.
This week Alexis listened to
The Scratch – Pullin’ Teeth (ft Kevin Rheault)
Sounds awful in theory – Irish traditional music meets heavy rock – but works to bracing effect in reality, further bolstered by Kevin Rheault’s raw-throated rapping.
