Last summer, I had just hopped off a plane at John F. Kennedy International Airport to head home after a particularly distressing job when a stranger caught my eye. In the crowd rushing toward me was a woman dressed in a graphic hoodie, wide-leg pants, heeled boots and a pair of over-the-ear headphones. When my gaze settled at the face of this stranger, I froze. This was the face of the woman on the cover of “Puberty 2” and “Be the Cowboy.” Waves of panic diffused across my body as I came to the startling realization: Wait, did I just see Mitski? My teenage self stayed up dreaming about a scenario like this, but now that it was happening in the present, I was more paralyzed than thrilled. In the instant that Mitski passed by, I took what felt like the most obvious course of action: I pretended not to recognize her and kept walking.
When I began listening to the album “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” I recalled that serendipitous moment at the airport last summer with palpable relief that I had left Mitski alone. “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is a meditation on the familiar urge to burn it all down and begin anew. Mitski is known for experiencing repeated invasions of privacy from her infamous fans. In a 2022 feature in Vulture, the interviewer asked Mitski for the names of her cats. Mitski declined to answer this seemingly innocuous question, responding, “‘Mmmm, I shouldn’t say. The kids on the internet now are very savvy. They could type in the names, figure out where I live.’” The new album, which coincidentally features a cat motif, feels like an outpouring of the artist’s grief and rage at the fact that she now desires privacy as if it were a luxury.
On Feb. 27, the day of the album’s release, I clicked on the first track “In a Lake” with the intention of listening to the album all the way through. “I’d never live in a small town / I’ve made too many mistakes,” Mitski begins. Her lyrics are raw and honest, and they sketch the protagonist’s quiet longing for solitude that intensifies into desperation in the final chorus with a sudden burst of volume. At the end, Mitski sings with full conviction, “And in a big city, you can start over / The lights all around you, the dark safe in the sight / In a big city, you can start over.”
“In a Lake” blasted in my earbuds on repeat that day when I made my routine trips to Gordon Commons, or the Deece. I thought about how Vassar’s campus, and the Deece in particular, has come to feel like a panopticon where one is constantly held up against a magnifying glass. I felt the familiar ache for reinvention that Mitski so viscerally brought into light and relished in imagining myself floating on a body of water somewhere far away, enveloped by a gentle darkness.
On the cover of the album, a white cat stands still in front of yellow wallpaper, unaware that it could be ambushed by a yellow cat at any moment. When I first saw the cover art, I was immediately reminded of the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a woman struggling with postpartum depression is neglected by her physician husband. Eventually, the protagonist descends into madness, believing that there is a woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper of her room, and the woman in the wallpaper is herself.
Indeed, the music video for “Where’s My Phone” is a gothic episode full of distortions and glitches. Mitski, the protagonist, is trapped in a house with yellow wallpaper. She gradually loses her sanity as she makes fruitless attempts to get out, singing the upbeat refrain, “I just want my mind to be a clear glass / clear glass with nothing in my head.” The repetition of this joyous tune juxtaposed against the growing suffering of the female protagonist has an alienating effect; as a viewer, I felt like I, too, was descending deeper and deeper into this delirious nightmare that imprisons our protagonist. Since she cannot physically leave this harrowing house, her only way out is through numbness.
A similar theme emerges in “Dead Women” where the protagonist contemplates if she would be more liked by the “you” she is speaking to if she were dead. Here, the previously understated elements of horror are plainly displayed: “But since I’m alive, you’ll have to break in as I sleep / When you find my love beside me, choke him dead for having me.” I think “Dead Women” speaks to the fact that female musicians such as Chappell Roan are demonized as “hysterical” for demanding that people respect their personal boundaries. Instead, a woman in the public eye is expected to become a vessel for manipulation like “clear glass with nothing in [her] head.” To me, “Dead Women” and “Where’s My Phone” are chilling reminders of the unspoken horrors embedded in the everyday existence of women at large.
My favorite track by far in the entire album is “Instead of Here.” Sonically, “Instead of Here” resembles “Heaven” from Mitski’s previous album, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We.” Unlike “Heaven,” which is an ode to the kind of love that transports you to another world, “Instead of Here” features a conversation with death herself. “I’m not here, I’m where nobody can reach,” the narrator reiterates, as if saying it again and again will make it come true. This song has the classic Mitski themes—agony, yearning and death—all explored with relentless vulnerability, embodying everything I love about Mitski’s art. “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is an invitation to stare sadness in the eye, unblinking, and slowly lay bare the intricate realities hidden beneath it. The album offers a special kind of catharsis.