I’ve been listening to Mitski since middle school; I saw her live on her last two tours for Laurel Hell and The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, and over the years, I’ve borne witness to how her music is often reduced to a stereotypical ‘sad girl’ soundtrack for all the manic pixie dream girls. This completely strips away the devastatingly beautiful nature of her work, especially with her newest album, Nothing's About to Happen to Me.
Released this past February, marking Mitski’s eighth studio album, Nothing's About to Happen to Me, is arguably the musician's most emotionally devastating and lyrically complex project yet. The album, running just over 34 minutes across 11 tracks, is her longest release yet. In Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, we follow a narrator struggling to deal with conflicting desires: a desperate yearning for solitude, and the thirst for an end to the loneliness she faces as she searches for any form of connection, no matter how toxic it may be. We witness the narrator wrestle with her own pathetic actions as she is forced to confront the reality of the end — not necessarily the end of a relationship or life itself, but more so the end of a version of herself that has suffered. The album is as deeply controlled as it is deranged; in one moment, it hauntingly exposes the world's darkness, and in the next, it reveals the narrator’s strange self-love. In theory, there are too many contradictions in this project for it to work, but it has a surprising cohesiveness as it weaves a narrative about the search for human connection.
The album opens unexpectedly with “In a Lake,” a track dominated by American folk influences that we haven't heard from Mitski before, as the narrator vents her frustrations on the suffocating feeling of being trapped by a version of yourself that you would rather forget in a small town. There is a longing for an escape from the crushing forced conformity of small towns and for the inherent anonymity large cities provide that makes personal reinvention possible. And as someone who grew up in a small town, this track perfectly captures the quiet claustrophobia that comes from being vilified for not fitting into conventional and limiting standards.
From there, we’re led into the album’s lead single and standout track, “Where Is My Phone.” Echoing the raw energy of some of Mitski’s early work, such as “Townie,” the track explores dissociation as a twisted form of escape. The narrator faces extreme pressure from society to conform, causing a ubiquitous anxiety that dominates her life, and she copes with it through detached sexual intimacy with strangers. And although there is a strange comfort in this disconnected act, the narrator is only further immersed in a state of numbness — much like that which caused her desperate actions in the first place.
Mitski gives us no room to breathe as she moves into the album’s most devastating stretch: “Cats,” “If I Leave” and “Dead Women.” Our narrator realizes that although her lover is irreplaceable to her, she is 100% replaceable to her lover. She is disgustingly codependent on her lover for validation — a fact that she is aware of but unwilling to address, since she is convinced no one else would be able to tolerate her many flaws. Mitski gifts us a startling honesty that continues as she explores the structural dehumanization of women in society in “Dead Women.” The narrator comes to the depressing conclusion that although our patriarchal society strips women of their autonomy through exploitative and toxic relationships, as seen in “Cats” and “If I Leave,” there is no true escape for women from this control, not even in death.
By the time “I’ll Change for You” arrives, the album has taken on a melancholic yet hopeful tone. The track leaves room for opposing interpretations: Either the narrator is so desperate to escape solitude that she is willing to change anything about herself to be more appealing, or the “you” she is changing for is herself — she is ready to grow from this search for connection. The ambiguity of it lies heavy, as we, the audience, are forced to decide if the narrator has given in to her unhinged spiraling journey for human connection or has instead found comfort in the quiet. The eeriness of it all makes the closing track, “Lightning,” a call for rebirth. The narrator has seemingly accepted that the version of herself who has endured incessant suffering — depicted throughout the album — has come to an end. This is her “death,” but, for once, it is not an act of self-destruction; it is a fragile attempt at a new beginning. The narrator finally understands that her conflicting desires for connection and anonymity won’t be found in someone else, but rather in herself.
Leslie Monter-Casio is a member of the Class of 2028 in the Brooks School of Public Policy. They are a staff writer for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at lm953@cornell.edu.
