Since 2019, Mitski has been quietly hinting that her next album might be her last. A prolonged hiatus, compounded by the pandemic, stretched the silence—until 2022’s Laurel Hell arrived, pushing further into the ’80s synth-pop territory she first explored on 2018’s Be the Cowboy. A year later came the hushed, weathered The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, which I believe I reviewed here.
The tension at the centre of Mitski’s career is that she could easily ascend to Sabrina Carpenter-tier pop stardom by leaning into digestible synth hooks, but doing so would betray the moody, introspective artistic identity she’s spent years building. For holding that line, she earns genuine respect.
So — Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. Opener “In a Lake” picks up precisely where The Land Is Inhospitable… left off: soft, alt-Americana, unhurried. I’d have happily taken a full album in that mode, but Mitski pivots. “Where’s My Phone” brings scrappy indie rock energy, and the fiery shoegaze-punk outro of “If I Leave” feels like a direct callback to Bury Me at Makeout Creek—rawer, more combustible. The full-band approach suits her well; there’s always been a particular ache to her arrangements when live instrumentation backs those dwelling, isolationist lyrics. The album also stretches into orchestral territory, most strikingly on the brooding “Dead Women” and the Bossa nova-tinged “I’ll Change for You.”
Lyrically, this is where Mitski either soars or stalls for me. When she inhabits themes of loneliness, isolation, and death with full commitment, the songs stick. Nearly every track here—save the slightly odd counting-song opener “Rules”— finds her excavating the darkest corners of her interior life and emerging with some of the most considered writing of her career.
The loose concept of a lonely woman in an unkept house holds everything together: conversations with death, cats as metaphors for freedom, and a slow reconciliation with preferring solitude. “That White Cat” is the album’s best trick—beginning as something almost playful, then quietly morphing into one of its darkest moments, the tone shifting beautifully against dark spaghetti-western guitar and an eerie choir texture. Closing track “Lightning” starts as a slow-burning indie rock build—the main riff carries a distinct Twin Peaks quality—before exploding into a bridge that feels unmistakably adjacent to “Your Best American Girl.”
What Nothing’s About to Happen to Me ultimately demonstrates is that Mitski is fluent enough in her own catalogue to revisit older sounds without retreating into them, while exploring new textures and deepening what was always there. It’s among her best works.
