MITSKI - Nothing’s About To Happen To Me

But in a lake, you can backstroke forever

The sky before you and the dark behind you

And in a big city, you can start over

The lights all around you, the dark safe inside

In a big city, you can start over

In the words of "In A Lake", the opening track of "Nothing's About To Happen To Me", the eighth album by Mitski, you can hear the dual soul of a record with which the indie singer-songwriter, who holds both American and Japanese citizenship, aims to navigate between bucolic phrasing and bursts of rock. It's an opening built around an expanded idea of travel, one that sounds like a metaphor for a shifting state of mind, by turns cosmopolitan or introverted depending on the moment.

Produced and recorded by Patrick Hyland and mastered by Bob Weston, with Kris Bulakowski assisting on drums and logistics, "Nothing's About To Happen To Me" gathers eleven songs that alternate dormant disillusionment with sudden bursts of strong emotion, occasionally punctuated by Bruno Esrubilsky.

Mitski thus tries to follow the trail blazed on "The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We" — it's no coincidence that the band backing her here is largely the same one from her last tour. An orchestra also turns up, recorded at Sunset Sound and TTG Studios, arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, with Michael Harris collaborating and Isaac Diskin and Alex Miller assisting, its presence never intrusive and capable of conjuring phantasmagoric moments, as in the second half of the opening track. Meanwhile the lead single, "Where's My Phone?", brings back the immediacy Mitski needs to win over listeners beyond her own fanbase without losing too much sleep over it.

The third single from the batch, titled even more simply "If I Leave", in turn recalls the indie-rock glories of "Be The Cowboy", just as "I'll Change For You" is the surprisingly jazzy ballad, built on supporting piano and a tender vocal turn from Mitski — a song meant for the dead of night, among bars about to close and cars drifting slowly through the dark on some small-town street. Strings once again tiptoe in here, sustaining a retro atmosphere throughout that is, in part, new territory even for Mitsuki Laycock (her real name).

These are new solutions that may have been adopted with an eye on the musical Mitski is currently composing for the show based on the script of “The Queen's Gambit”. And even when certain cowgirl fascinations resurface, à la Juice Newton, just to give a clearer idea, as in “Rules”, the Broadway-esque approach is always lurking just around the corner. And then there's the typical Mitski restlessness that kicks things off in “That White Cat” before exploding into a choral finale.

Amid this string of well-balanced ideas, the gospel touch backed by violin also works well on “Charon's Obol”, a track mournful right from its title, celebrating Charon's toll: the coin once placed over the eyes of the dead in antiquity before burial.

“Nothing's About To Happen To Me” is neither Mitski's pop-crossover record nor the bold album with which she shuffles the deck at some point in her career, but rather an LP of good songs with which the New York-based musician rows, without too many upheavals, toward a blend that's as tried-and-tested as it is, in part, atypical for her usual standards, ultimately gifting us a sort of indie-rock operetta that, in its own way, casts a spell.

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08/03/2026