Emma Llamas | Writer
March 6, 2026
After a two, almost three, year hiatus, Mitski came back with a new album: Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. This is the Indie Rock musician’s 8th studio album, and it follows her commercially successful The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We— which had the breakout song “My Love Mine All Mine” which reached Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 2023.
The artist, born in Japan, moved frequently in her youth and ended up moving to Turkey, China, Malaysia, Czech Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and eventually settled in the United States. She started her career in her teens and had a talent manager while she lived in Japan, and she involved herself in her high school’s choir. She then studied at SUNY Purchase College’s Conservatory of Music, where she then made her first 3 albums. In 2015, she signed to her current label, Dead Oceans, where she then made the album Puberty 2, and amassed a dedicated fanbase.
Senior Ava Sato, and long time fan of Mitski, shared that “her vocals have always stood out to [her] the most…and as an artist, [she] loves how assured she is in her art…[she] has always thought it was so profound.” This new album offers her usual experimental sound, but it harps on themes of solitude, the desire to escape oneself and society, and discusses the ideas of mortality and rebirth in everyday life. It’s message is that solitude and individuality, which people so often adopt in today’s technological world, lead to cycles of deeper detachment from real connection and real life. She expresses these dual themes with the added folk component to the sound as it clashes with the almost shocking rock elements. She captivates readers with her music and intrigues listeners with the visual aspects of her music videos. “Where Is My Phone,” “If I Leave,” and “I’ll Change for You,” have captivating and beautiful visuals, which are campy and haunting all at once. The visuals contribute to the overarching messages of the album and add a layer of intrigue which allows viewers to dig deeper because of their thought provoking nature. They also add to the wider narrative she tells, which follows a woman and a street cat.
She writes songs like “Charon’s Obol” and “The White Cat” as short scenes of a wider story, almost like a collection of poems, and fills them with odd symbols like the house, nature elements, and the cat to further express confinement and disconnections. These snippets are consistent throughout the album and correlate to the melancholy world that she illustrates throughout her songs.
Senior Lexi Thi, after hearing the main single of the album, said she expected it to “show an evolution of her sound…it did — and was exciting to hear, but [she] was still pleasantly surprised to also hear soft remains of the sound Mitski’s first few albums had,” which is true. The album still holds remnants of Mitski’s thoughtful, poetic and experimental artistry, but simultaneously explores new parts of herself as she faces her own isolation and the wider societal and cultural elements which provoke it. Mitski continues to show her talents for writing, music and even visual performance through her new album. She encapsulates emotions which stay relevant throughout space and time, and uses her lyrics, vocal delivery, and metaphors to capture what simple language cannot. This album is not just a beautiful rivet of Mitski’s music to new and old audiences, but also a simple expression of wider felt anxieties within everyday life. Still, the album offers an electric and gripping experience, of which only Mitski has been able to consistently present.
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