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Mitski has long held an obsession with performance. That may sound obvious in reference to someone whose job is performing music for people, but Mitski has regularly used her albums and live shows as ways to interrogate her own relationship to being seen. She uses her art to examine — and complicate — what it means to be all of the things she is at once: indie pop star and Asian-American woman, public figure and private person, the designated conduit of an audience’s sadness and yearning.
On Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, she takes her fascination with performance further than ever, designing a fictional narrative around an eccentric recluse who is self-possessed and a little feral; through Mitski’s narration, the album follows a woman as she retreats from the outside world to her unkempt house, a place of cats and dark humor and chosen solitude. But Mitski doesn’t disappear into the character. She narrates her with the same radiant poise and meditative clarity that has defined her recent work, and in doing so, arrives at a paradox that has shadowed her entire career: the more elaborate the performance, the more undeniably herself she becomes. It’s a terrific work, thematically rich and containing some of the most precise and emotionally devastating songwriting of her career.
When we last left her on The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, Mitski’s sound had thoroughly shifted from the heart-on-her-sleeve indie rock that brought her critical attention toward a lush, folk-inflected sound steeped in American myth. Nothing’s About to Happen to Me picks up that thread and pulls it tighter, retaining the orchestral sweep and Americana grandeur of its predecessor while reintroducing the guitar-driven rawness of her earlier work. Several songs, like lead single “Where’s My Phone?” and the all-powerful “That White Cat,” hearken back to the widescreen angst found in Bury Me at Makeout Creek and Puberty II; but for the most part, the tone on this new project is one of orchestral intimacy, the songs unfolding slowly and spaciously around Mitski’s lustrous, unwavering vocals.
Though it resists any close autobiographical references, it’s easy to read Nothing’s About to Happen to Me as a breakup album. Its central character has retreated into solitude in the aftermath of a love that has ended or is ending, and the album traces what that retreat actually costs: the freedom of invisibility alongside the ache of being truly unknown. Certain songs reference this conflict pretty explicitly; “If I Leave” finds Mitski repeatedly emphasizing that this person is the only witness to her inner life, while the stunning ballad “I’ll Change for You” furthers this theme by offering total self-erasure in exchange for being loved again.
She frequently references cats, using them as a kind of shorthand for the album’s central emotional tension. On “Cats,” the protagonist finds comfort in her pets in the wake of abandonment, but the final lines find her acknowledging that one day, those cats will eventually leave her too. It’s only the third song on the album where this character seems to accept the impermanence of life and the inevitability of loss; by the end, when a white neighborhood cat claims her house as his own in “That White Cat,” she’s working to pay for a house that, by the logic of cats, was never really hers.
English (US) · 