Over the last decade, Mitski has consistently disproved the longest held music biz adage: that you have to conform to trends to reach mass appeal.
The Japan-born, world-raised artist has been a massive musical force for over a decade, but she reached new TikTok-powered heights in 2023 when her song “My Love Mine All Mine,” from The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are we, smashed through the ceiling to 1.8 billion streams on Spotify. Crucially, the song does not sound like your typical TikTok-optimized hit. It’s a good old fashioned Mitski strange: melodically liquid, instrumentally grand, lyrically piercing, a pulsing vein of feeling.
When she announced her new album, Nothing’s About To Happen To Me, in January, the question on my mind became: what happens next after you’ve bared yourself for the world to see and become impossibly, maybe even nightmarishly, famous? For Mitski, the answer appears to be a record that shuts us inside a private abode and invites us to pace the halls, and peer out the foreboding windows, beside her.
