Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is gorgeous but harrowing
Tom W. Clarke
Mitski, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me
★★★★
Avant-garde indie-rock musician Mitski is one of those remarkable galaxy-brain artists with the power to make the miniscule feel gigantic and the celestial seem almost claustrophobic.
In the same way that Everything Everywhere All At Once – the sci-fi action Oscar winner, for which Mitski was nominated for best original song – transformed a humble laundromat into a gateway to the multiverse, on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, her eighth studio album, Mitski expands the four walls of a tiny inner-city apartment into a deep ponderous lake of reflection and heartache.
It’s an entrancing meditation on death, memory and rebirth; on anonymity in a world that is always watching (especially true for a singer whose work has prompted a cult-like devotion on TikTok); on the loneliness of starting again and the power in being alone.
“I’d never live in a small town, I’ve made too many mistakes”, she croons in the first line of album opener, In A Lake. It’s a brilliantly cinematic prologue, a gentle rebuke of the peering eyes and long memories of small towns, and the excitement of escaping to a big city.
But the reality of that escape hits like a truck on the next track (and the album’s lead single), Where’s My Phone?, a rollicking, spiralling song about disappearing into distraction. It’s dark-edged and psychedelic, with a 30-something Dorothy finding herself lost on the dirty streets of an urbanised Oz.
An early taste of this LP may have been the single I’ll Change For You – a jazzy, soulful break-up song, it’s an accessible entry point to the album that barely grazes the depths of darkness and complexity the record explores once our protagonist has locked herself in the self-imposed prison of her new apartment.
On Cats, she finds disassociated comfort in her reclusiveness. Dead Women is devastating and blackly comic, the most sardonically haunting of imaginings, like Tori Amos channelling The Cure in a vivid portrait of grief. On If I Leave, she wanders the city with no aim but to escape and forget, in a city she doesn’t know, surrounded by people who don’t know her – a chilling piece of storytelling punctuated by a surprising burst of fury.
Instead of Here, the album’s most beguiling and transportive track, is an ethereal paean to a conversation between our protagonist and Death, so inexplicably casual that they must have had it a thousand times. “She’d mosey on in case next time’s the end…” Mitski sings, as she retreats so far inward that even Death knows it’s not time for a chat right now.
The record reaches its climax with That White Cat. A thundering, twisted, funhouse mirror take on the circle of life, it’s a touch less uplifting than The Lion King’s version – unlike Mufasa, Mitski clearly doesn’t view herself as the top of the food chain in her own house, behind the cats, possums and even the bugs.
Nothing’s About to Happen to Me won’t be for everyone. It’s a stunning piece of work, though it can feel suffocating at times, an abyss with few pockets of light. It’s less Everything Everywhere All At Once, and more like its best picture challenger that year, All Quiet on the Western Front – harrowing, poignant and uncomfortably beautiful, an artistic triumph well worth the pain and discomfort but unlikely to be on high rotation.
It’s colossal and minikin, gorgeous and ugly, all-encompassing and deeply specific. But it’s a journey to nowhere that you simply have to take.
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