Few musical artists can stake as complete a monopoly over sullen post-pandemic “sad girl soundtrack” Spotify playlists as Mitsuki Miyawaki, and for good reason. After seven compositionally genius indie-rock albums and multiple songs that have risen to over 1 billion Spotify streams, the Japanese-American phenomenon has proven her skill at articulating the grittiest of brokenheartedness. Yet in her Feb. 27 album “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” Mitski reaches even further, grasping at the interiority of discontentment itself.
Through 11 tracks, Mitski’s narrator clings onto crumbs of connection, chronicling the hazy dread that accompanies her in her loneliness. At times, she turns to lovers to ease her restlessness, but finds herself disillusioned by her replaceability, lamenting, “If I leave, somebody else will love you / But nobody else could forgive me / Quite as often as you.” Growing increasingly crazed, she furnishes her cognitive cell with critters for comfort — a stray white cat and red-corseted wasps, then folkloric Wilis-like dead women with packs of hounds — before beginning to envisage how her corpse will be embalmed before her belongings are auctioned off to an enthusiastic crowd.
Underneath the overgrowth of her deranged spiral, Mitski’s meticulous puppeteering allows each song to flourish individually. “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is sonically diverse, and Mitski’s immaculate instincts for experimentation let her produce each track in a way that shouldn’t work but somehow does: like the rustic banjo followed by a blaring horn finale in “In a Lake” and loud, Americana-heavy maximalism in “That White Cat.” The tracks are bound together by her singular voice and tone, so that even as the album oscillates between genres and dimensions, each song is so grounded that it seems more “Mitski” than the last.
But Mitski’s music is still most gorgeous when she slows down and leans into her organic softness. “I’ll Change For You,” set with satiny bossa nova, is the aching heart of the album. While meandering drunk outside a bar, she spills her regrets to the passing cars, singing, “I’ll do anything for you to love me again.” Amid swirls of emotional turbulence, “I’ll Change For You” glows, anchoring the album against fuzzy echoes of chatter and bringing its energy back down to meet listeners where they are.
That same gentle quality has propelled Mitski to greatness again and again — it fueled her unexpected 2023 commercial breakthrough when her song “My Love Mine All Mine” went TikTok viral and landed at #26 in the Billboard Top 40. But even after that fleeting taste of mainstream fame, she hasn’t corrupted her craft to farm brainless soundbites. Conversely, it seems like the more fame Mitski racks up, the harder she leans into her campiness. Every one of her eccentric projects commits to portraying a fully developed image, and “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is no exception. With a string of stunning short music videos that nod to Mitski’s beginnings as a filmmaker, the album is a complete artistic vision, and with her careful shaping, even paranoid scrappiness feels thoughtful.
The tracks don’t all have immediate appeal, though. Some stretches of the album, while artistically indispensable, are a little too camp to be casually listenable. “Rules” features a more roguish soundscape as Mitski’s narrator self-soothes by repeatedly counting to ten. “Where’s My Phone?” is similarly distorted, following her dissociative craving to “float until [her] mind is like a clear wax / Clear wax, melted in the dome.”
But for those who are willing to look closer, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” reveals layers and layers with each listen. It’s lyrically devastating, but Mitski still handles her sadness with gentleness and restraint. In “Instead of Here,” she admits, “I’ll be opening my box / Of old friend misery, my secret treat / To feel like myself again.” Recounting the wistful return to daily life after a failed suicide attempt, Mitski portrays a unique misery that someone less well-versed in loneliness might fumble: where sadness feels so comfortable that she doesn’t know who she is without it. She’s developed this articulation well over her 14-year career, and evidence of her previous works lingers everywhere — in the existentialist sexual dread of “Rules” (2012’s self-produced debut “Lush”), the driving, metallic rock guitar of “Where’s My Phone?” (2014’s “Bury Me at Makeout Creek”) and tender, acoustic-backed vocals in “Cats” (2023’s “The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We”).
“Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” showcases Mitski’s best storytelling yet: theatrical flourishes, pooling vocals, eerie anthropomorphism and raw guitar — all unlikely elements juxtaposed with a curator’s precision to drag listeners down a paranoid spiral. But even as the narrator sinks fully into madness, the ending isn’t tragic. In the final track, “Lightning,” she sings, “When I die / Could I come back as the rain? / See the world again, to fall again?” suggesting that even while miserable, falling itself is what makes us feel alive.
RATING: 4.5/5
