With more than 21 million monthly listeners on Spotify, Mitski is no stranger to being watched. She’s been in the spotlight for more than 14 years now, since the release of her debut, Lush, in 2012. However, it wasn’t until her 2018 album Be the Cowboy that she rose to prominence in the indie music scene. Since then, Mitski has accumulated an almost cult-like following that has been likened to BTS or Taylor Swift stans in terms of intensity. As someone the media repeatedly describes as a private person, Mitski has had a conflicting relationship with her fame. She does not engage with social media, instead opting to have a manager run her accounts as she believes that the hordes of opinions and commentary on her work (whether good or bad) negatively contribute to her self-image.
This pressure to live up to strangers’ expectations and the all–encompassing feeling of being watched shine through on Mitski’s eighth studio album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. The project is set in a house through which Mitski explores her anxieties about being available for the public to dissect and discard. The album is vulnerable; it places all of her emotional turmoil about being a public figure on display, dressed up in metaphors about navigating personal relationships.
The instrumentals in Nothing’s About to Happen to Me jump from an eerie, anxiety-inducing violin to stripped back acoustics, to a screaming guitar-drum duo over the course of the album. “Dead Women” strikes a particularly poignant balance between these different styles of instrumentation. Opening with a delicate drumline, Mitski wastes no time before unsettling the listener: “Would you have liked me better if I’d died?”
Her soft vocals invite the listener in, as if Mitski is getting ready to share a secret, only to push away again as she invokes violent imagery, breaking the fragile ambiance. The lyrics describe a woman being reinvented by outsiders who seem to have only become interested in her life after her death. Mitski is no longer Mitski, but instead what we make her out to be. Her regrets about using her real name for her music career feel especially pertinent. She has become a stranger to herself. Toward the end of the track, everything becomes much louder, as if she’s come to terms with others retelling her story, and through that choice, she has reclaimed her power.
“That White Cat” opts for a different route. “It’s supposed to be my house,” Mitski cries, “But I guess, according to cats, now it’s his house.” The guitars are raw, the drums are beating rapidly and the listener feels as if they should be running from some ominous presence. As more voices join Mitski to chant “ya ya ya” on the chorus, the eerie atmosphere swells, leaving you with the sense that you’re teaming up with the white neighborhood cat attempting to invade Mitski’s home.
Although this project is set in a fictional house, it is no escape from reality. Throughout the track list, listeners are repeatedly teleported back to the real world as honking horns interrupt the quiet isolation on “In a Lake,” and sound bites of fragmented, unintelligible conversations are scattered within “I’ll Change for You.” These moments shatter the illusion of isolation and reinforce to the audience that you’re never truly as isolated as you believe. Reality and all its troubles will come to find you in the end. “Where’s My Phone?” stands out as a more explicit critique of modern society’s desire to remain connected at all times. In “If I Leave,” Mitski clings to others not out of love, but out of fear: “But nobody else could see me / Quite as clearly as you.”
Nothing’s About to Happen to Me never fails to surprise, as it lulls you into a false sense of comfort only to disrupt it, suggesting scrutiny only amplifies your loneliness. The guitars sing just as much as Mitski on this project, and they seem to be screaming, “Leave me alone.” The record allows for the boundaries of public and private to intermingle and dissolve. No matter how far Mitski retreats, people, memories and technology come to hunt her down. No interior space is left untouched; even the most intimate environments for the artist are left to be probed and examined.
Daily Arts Writer Caroline Nowik can be reached at cnowik@umich.edu.
