Mitski, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me

Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, the 8th full length studio album from art rock icon Mitski, sees her retaining her characteristic maximalist Spaghetti Western color palette but mapping it to more insular, sundown sojourns in lieu of theater kid party anthems. The result is something that feels like it reflects both perennial anxieties and perennial truths. 

It seems intuitive that a significant amount of a person’s internal disposition becomes visible through their reaction to fame. While Mitski’s ascent to stardom has progressed at a consistently upward slope since at least Bury Me At Makeout Creek a little over a decade ago, it certainly got a bit more logarithmic with her previous album The Land is Inhospitable And So Are We, whose third single "My Love Mine All Mine," at time of writing, soundtracks close to 3 million TikTok videos. Despite this Mitski has consistently refused the conversion of her life into consumable spectacle and has previously expressed a desire to pivot away from something once it becomes popular. Perhaps in line with this ethic, many of the load-bearing songs on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me rotate around the trappings and structure of her past work in new, open-ended and breezy directions that manage to balance weariness, dissatisfaction, and an anchored, independent sense of agency.

Frankly, a solid chunk of this project consists of a variety of flavors of rumination on death. Whether via the direct, hypnotic, obvious graveyard invocations on "If I Leave" progressing into claustrophobic tunnels or Mitski’s grappling with the hypothetical aftermath of her own passing on "Dead Women"  (“While I dream of flying, stab me twenty-seven times, ransack the house for what you’ll auction, what you’ll keep.”) a recurring theme during this process is both the temporary (the gendered, the socially constructed, the banal) and the eternal (“Death said I’d called, not knowing that I did, She said she wished I’d known that I’m still just a kid”). The really interesting thing here is the silence that seems to undergird both views of time.

Another cool interwoven element here is a more languid twang that somehow keeps from collapsing fully into nostalgia. "Cats," one among many lonesome John Prine-esque trips we’re taken on, is inflected by a healthy amount of steel and warbling synth organ columns. These moments add a warm sepia to the project as a whole, not new at all to Mitski’s style but in this context, they make things feel a bit more like searching for the big picture vs. searching for good times lost. 

"I’ll Change For You" is a definite highlight, with tight orchestral accompaniment decorating emotional mountains and valleys (“I’ll do anything for you to love me again.”) in warm brass glow. It reveals an ear for tilting chord progression that I can only really compare to Burt Bacharach’s pop genius - something that’s been obvious about Mitski’s approach for a while but, maybe, only becomes more obvious when things are stripped down and hollowed out. 

"That White Cat" and "Charon’s Obol" form a very pleasant closed loop nearing the album’s end, with the former building into a throbbing punk-y meditation on the absurdity of stamping things like property and identity onto the huge, reciprocal processes of the natural world and the latter resting the protagonist’s nightly ritual of feeding the neighborhood strays into a shape note choir kaleidoscope. Together, the two form a dialectical question and answer to one of the album’s core themes. 

It’s worth remarking that the album’s cover features a highly textured portrait of a white cat gazing outwards with serene confidence (and heterochromatic eyes). But the complete version of the artwork by illustrator Marc Burckhardt, which seems to only be visible on all physical media versions of the album, features another cat stalking our calm hero, poised to strike from the corner of our field of view. Behind both figures we see ornate yellow wallpaper.