Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is gorgeous but harrowing
Tom W. Clarke
Mitski, Nothing Will Happen to Me
★★★★
Avant-garde indie-rock musician Mitski is one of those extraordinary galaxy-brained artists with the power to make tiny things feel huge and the celestial almost claustrophobic.
likewise Everything Everywhere at the Same Time – The Oscar-winning sci-fi action movie, for which Mitski was nominated for best original song, transformed a humble laundromat into a gateway to the multiverse. Nothing Will Happen to MeHer eighth studio album, Mitski, transforms the four walls of a small downtown apartment into a deep, heavy lake of reflection and heartache.
A fascinating meditation on death, memory and rebirth; on anonymity in a world that’s always watching (especially true for a singer whose work has sparked cult-like devotion on TikTok); On the loneliness of starting over and the power of being alone.
“I never lived in a small town, I made too many mistakes,” he croons in the first line of the album opener. In a Lake. It’s a wonderfully cinematic prologue, a gentle rebuke of the staring eyes, the long memories of small towns and the excitement of escaping to a big city.
But the reality of this escape hits the next track (and the album’s lead single) like a truck. Where’s My Phone?, An upbeat, spiraling song about getting distracted and lost. A dark and psychedelic film, 30-something Dorothy finds herself lost in the dirty streets of an urbanized Oz.
An early taste of this LP might be the only one I Will Change For You – A jazzy, emotional breakup song, it’s an accessible entry point to the album that barely scrapes the depths of darkness and complexity the record explores after our hero locks himself in the self-imposed prison of his new apartment.
Open cats, he finds disengaged comfort in his asceticism. Dead Women devastating and darkly funny, the most cynically haunting of dreams, like Tori Amos channeling The Cure in a vivid portrait of grief. Open If I leave He wanders around a city he does not know, surrounded by people who do not know him, with no purpose other than to escape and forget; A chilling piece of storytelling punctuated by a surprising explosion of rage.
Instead of here The album’s most seductive and affecting track is an ethereal ode to a conversation between our protagonist and Death; It’s so inexplicably mundane they must have done it thousands of times. “He’d keep going, just in case the next time was the end…” Mitski sings as she retreats so far inward that even Death knows this isn’t the time for conversation right now.
The record reached its peak That White Cat. A distorted, funhouse mirror that thunders around the circle of life; This is a less uplifting touch. The Lion King‘s version – unlike Mufasa, Mitski clearly doesn’t see herself at the top of the food chain behind cats, opossums, or even bugs in her own home.
Nothing Will Happen to Me It won’t be for everyone. It’s a striking work, an abyss with little light, even if it feels stifling at times. Less Everything Everywhere at the Same Timeand it’s more like the best picture competition of that year, All Quiet on the Western Front – heartbreaking, poignant and disturbingly beautiful, an artistic triumph worth the pain and discomfort but unlikely to be in high rotation.
Huge and tiny, magnificent and ugly, all-encompassing and extremely specific. But it’s a journey you have to take that doesn’t lead anywhere.
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