Mitski was one of the great social media posters before the internet tried to swallow her whole. “I used to rebel by destroying myself, but realized that’s awfully convenient to the world,” went a 2016 tweet from the musician, who long ago nuked that account. “For some of us, our best revolt is self-preservation.”
As her career has skyrocketed with multiple TikTok-powered streaming juggernauts following the 2018 viral hit Nobody, Mitski has gradually withdrawn from the public eye and declined most interviews. Over her last few albums, she has adopted a mode of performance that contrasts with the emotion of her lyrics: on the tour to support 2018’s Be the Cowboy, she used plain folding chairs and tables as props in a performance that felt almost robotic in its precision.
On the third show of a six-night residency at the Shed in New York, that choreography-as-armor is transformed into an assured looseness; she wears a stark white button down, fitted vest and and black slacks, affecting a 90s Hugh Grant insouciance. A stage set re-creates a fictional cozy residence, complete with two lamps that cast a soft glow over cushy chaises.
Tonight’s masterful set spans her catalogue but is mainly drawn from her new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. During opener In a Lake, Mitski strides out, unrushed and measured, joining her five-person band to greet a crowd of more than 2,000 who cheer with appreciation. Backed by only acoustic guitar, she croons under soft purple light, creating a hush over the audience with her rich, soaring vocals in the same way that she used to in venues a 20th of the size. As with her previous tours, her live singing voice tops any recording.
Mitski understands how to caricature American pastiche better than most. During a thrumming rendition of the ballad Buffalo Replaced from her album The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, she projects old footage of buffalo migration and freight trains on to Lynch-esque crushed velvet curtains, pushing American colonialism of the west to the front of one’s mind. The aesthetic is equally used to cheeky effect: during the rollicking Where’s My Phone, a lead single off the new album, she almost skips across stage while 1950s footage of white actors pantomimed taking telephone calls. “I just want my mind to be a clear glass / Clear glass with nothing in my head,” she sings theatrically, nodding rhythmically and rigorously as she wove back and forth across the stage.
Mitski has spent her last few tours finding space in her catalogue for experimentation. Tonight she performs a rock version of Laurel Hell’s Stay Soft that takes the electronic-pop of that album in an emo direction, calling forth the gritty grunge of 2014’s Bury Me at Makeout Creek, while Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula screens behind her.
She finally breaks her silence over halfway through the set. “Oh, I thought I was alone here!” Mitski says to a few scattered laughs in the cavernous space. “I was making a joke,” she encourages, breaking the audience out of their reverent silence. Tonight is my ninth Mitski show, and it is buoyed by the artist in perhaps the most joyous, comfortable mood that I’ve seen her. She never misses a beat or a mark, even when she has to pause to make sure someone in the crowd is OK.
There are some heartbreaking love songs on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, but tonight Mitski takes clear joy in a performance that is by turns slapstick, then remote, then slouched and casually embodied. For the heart wrenching I Bet on Losing Dogs, she is bathed in green lights. The song reduced me to tears in college and still touches someplace unspeakable and human in my chest. Mitski can make magic that way.
