• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Feb 24, 2026 Web Exclusive By Caleb Campbell

Isolation can be painful and addling, but it can also have an allure. Famously, more than a few classic albums have come together after an artist retreats into extended solitary writing sessions. There can be a freeing element in existing without the weight of others’ judgment or perception. Mitski’s latest album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, is in many ways a meditation on isolation. Mitski adopts the frame of a reclusive woman, living out her days surrounded by her clutter and cats. Within this character, she crafts one of her most musically exploratory and thematically focused albums.

Mitski’s songwriting has always centered on women’s interior lives, exploring the often jagged, manic, and wounded complexities that lie beneath visions of suburban domesticity, as seen in tracks like “Washing Machine Heart” or “A Pearl.” Nothing’s About to Happen to Me takes these vignettes further along to bleak and sinister ends. “Dead Woman” frames Mitski’s narrator as most useful in death, where her interiority and depth can be stripped away for the use of a man: “Would you have liked me better if I’d died / So you could tell my story / The way it ought to be / You’d find my parents and ask to see my things / Rifle through it all / Fill the blanks with what you need.” Meanwhile, the ticking counting that bookends “Rules” feels like an anxious compulsion or ritual, while the lyrics narrate through dissociation in the aftermath of an assault.

Even the bucolic instrumental tones of tracks like “I’ll Change for You” or “Cats” have a darker undercurrent. In Mitski’s fraught households, any vestiges of love have curdled into something rotting and obsessive. She ponders leaving, but laments, “If I leave / Somebody else will love you / But nobody else could forgive me / Quite as often as you.” Conversely, she also subsumes her own identity to placate a lover she fears will leave. She begs, “I’ll do anything / For you to love me again / If you don’t like me now / I will change for you.”

Much of the album finds Mitski’s narrators retreating within themselves, finding refuge in numbing insular rituals, as on “Instead of Here”: “So excuse me / I’ll be opening my box / Of old friend misery / My secret treat / To feel like myself again / I won’t be here / I’ll be where nobody can reach.” The crazed off-kilter finale of “Where’s My Phone?” is one of the record’s best encapsulations of this kind of frayed mania. Mitski begs to lose herself, emptying everything out until “...my mind is like a clear glass / Clear glass with nothing going on / Or like a bug floating in the melted amber / Of a citronella candle / I will float until my mind is like a wax / Clear wax melted in the dome.”

However, moments of relief and catharsis shine through on the album’s closing pair of tracks, “Charon’s Obol” and “Lightning.” The former track finds Mitski’s narrator drawing comfort in the midnight ritual of caring for the dogs that gather at her house一remnants of the home’s previous owner一while the latter offers an ascendant and powerful closing note to the album, embracing death, rebirth, and transformation: “If I’m dark / All the better / To reflect the moonlight / If I mourn / All the better / To behold the sunrise.”

Mitski’s vignettes, as always, feel visceral and lived-in, and she traces them with equal parts grace and devastating weight. Yet, beyond the knotted dimensions of her lyrics, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me also finds Mitski at her most rich and adventurous. For as much as the album’s themes draw on solitude and loneliness, Mitski’s collaborators feel more present and important than ever. Her songs unfurl backed by her live band, who wield layers of gnarled guitar distortion alongside a symphonic array of strings, woodwinds, organs, horns, and pedal steel. The instrumentation builds upon the elegant shades of her previous album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, but she often takes her song structures down twisted new corridors.

The accordion-flecked opener, “In a Lake,” flits between swaying sun-lit tones and ornate, orchestral chaos. It feels like a lilting trip down the city street, only to find yourself mobbed by a crowd of tourists. Soon after, Mitski diverts into the paranoid driving rocker, “Where’s My Phone?,” recalling some of the guitar-heavy tracks on Bury Me at Makeout Creek before descending into a maelstrom of strings, echoing laughs, and a jagged-edged guitar solo. Moments of austere beauty like “If I Leave” descend into crashing and crushing interludes, while “That White Cat” rumbles along atop roiling drums, a tense, wiry guitar line, and chanting backing vocals. Elsewhere, the record’s flinty edges give way to playful bossa nova rhythms and gorgeous strings on “I’ll Change for You” and loping country and mid-century pop tones on “Charon’s Opal.”

Nothing’s About to Happen has some of the most moving moments in Mitski’s catalog, standing aside many of her darkest. The contrasts make each facet of the record hit harder, as beauty, tragedy, numbness, and rage all intermingle, led by detailed arrangements and rich songcraft. Mitski’s stately and artful lyrics cut as deep as ever, but her art pop tragedies have rarely felt this consciously curious. The album is a cluttered manor house full of secrets and peculiarities simply waiting to be opened. (www.mitski.com)

Author rating: 8.5/10