Mitski’s New Album Is a Dark Ode to Isolation
Mitski’s sound and writing style have evolved on almost every album she’s released. Her early album “Retired from Sad, New Career in Business,” from 2013, relied on big orchestral swells alongside electronics. Her breakout, “Bury Me at Makeout Creek,” released the following year, felt at times like a punk-rock sprint of guitar and drumbeats. On “Be the Cowboy,” her 2018 album, her production was more lush and full without wholly abandoning her flair for fuzzy and distorted guitar work. “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is a bit of a mashup of many of Mitski’s past endeavors, featuring big orchestral swings and moments of loud, frantic guitar, but its formal ambitions feel secondary to its expansive lyrical themes. On a line level, the songwriting comes alive with imagery and ache, such as on the album-closing song, “Lightning”—“When I die / Could I come back as the rain?” But the most fascinating quality of “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is how Mitski manages to embody an “I” with the full sense and spirit of a wonderfully complicated central character who is orbiting heartbreak and loss. In the song “Cats,” the narrator anticipates the absence of someone she still loves, a void being filled by two cats who sleep in bed with her at night. “Instead of Here” opens with a knock on the door and the woman depressed and lying on the floor instead of answering, with “death crouchin’ ” beside her. On “I’ll Change for You,” a listener overhears the woman on a drunken phone call, insisting that she’d do anything to be loved again—that she’s willing to change, to become whoever is needed to make the person return.
Despite how abject all this sounds, the protagonist does not seem weak or worthy of pity. Contrary to what she is enduring and expressing, she is rendered as someone who possesses a level of control. As the album proceeds, the lens shifts: she isn’t the one who is on the verge of madness; the world is, and she is one of the few people with the good sense to stay away from it as much as she can. The album’s concern is one that has shaped my own life and the lives of many people I know: when the world is increasingly inhospitable, is isolating oneself that irrational of a response? Mitski has no answer or illuminating moment that will make plain sense of this question for you, but the song “That White Cat,” propelled by churning percussion, perhaps provides a clue. The woman watches from her window as a neighborhood cat marks her house—a house that, she acknowledges, now pretty well belongs to the cat. At first, she insists, she has to go to work to pay for the cat’s house. Then again, to pay for the house is to pay for the wasp who lives in the roof, for the family of possums, for the bugs who will drink her blood, and for the birds who will eat those bugs, only to be killed by the cat. There is a thin border between isolation and loneliness, and, even if you retreat from the world, you are still in it. ♦
