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Lately I've been wondering if 2026 will be the year of the unreliable narrator. Or another such year, I should say — anyone with a phone knows that catfishing, influencer scams, bots and conspiracy theories have dominated the landscape for most of the century. This discombobulated era has reached an extreme, with the Epstein files exploding in a heavily redacted mess, AI leading people to the poorhouse or worse and political theater taking endless absurdist turns. Pop culture has followed suit with reality shows celebrating treachery, a box office hit starring bloody-minded, miscommunicating lovers and a likely Oscar winner based on a book by Thomas Pynchon, the bard of paranoia. Enter Mitski, dressed in rags and spangles as if a thrift store had exploded onto her, lipstick smeared, her new album title contradictory and confusing: Nothing's About to Happen to Me.
I know Mitski fans reading this are raising their eyebrows. Our queen of vulnerability, the indie music star most likely to cut through the vibes and filters that distort the moment and get to the raw heart of lived experience — unreliable? How dare I? Yet the artist herself has created the framework that, on this eighth studio album, foregrounds the warped perspectives and questionable motives of her characters like never before. From her first statements about it, Mitski has described Nothing's About to Happen to Me as a concept album about a woman who lives in unkempt solitude and is called a deviant when she ventures outside her home. A madwoman, at least to others, like the tragic heroine of an opera or a certain ghost wandering those old moors.
The video for the album's first single, the relatably delirious "Where's My Phone?," references the familiar tales of feminine dissolution Grey Gardens and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The 10 songs that surround it are highly theatrical in tone and operatic in mood; the album's dominant themes are romantic abjection, feminine self-erasure, depression, mania and the death drive. On a purely surface level, Nothing's About to Happen to Me can be read as an account of the worst breakup ever. Considered more deeply, it registers as a long scream about the many ways women have been classified as hysterics or accepted that out-of-body state as their fate.
Mitski has been in this space before — think of fan favorites from previous albums like "I Bet on Losing Dogs" and "Last Words of a Shooting Star," whose very titles signal their self-reflexive tearjerker emotionalism. Here though, she goes farther, relentlessly. The narrator of these songs seeks her own annihilation, offering to completely change for the lover who's abandoned her and then, when that fails, courting both psychic death ("I'll have a new hair cut / I will be somebody else / And when I leave my body, please pretend that you don't see how I'm no longer there," she sings in "Rules") and the real thing. She seeks comfort in the home she has established, but wild forces reach her even in that safe space — the cats who sit in her lap, purring, give way to a tom who haunts her at the window and makes her aware of all the pests encroaching on her safety, the wasps and possums and bugs and "birds who eat those bugs so that white cat can kill the birds."
Not only does she feel death crouching beside her; she seeks the souls of the women who have expired before her, a whole gallery that she paints in "Charon's Obol" as prisoners and victims of poisoned domesticity. In the end, she does find some resolution in the thought that, like an ancient Greek nymph, she might be absorbed into nature. "When I die," she sings, soaring over a wall of strings and vibrato-drenched guitar, "Could I come back in the rain?" She would love to dissolve, to be nowhere and linger everywhere.
It's the music that propels Nothing's About to Happen to Me beyond the pathos of one woman's struggle and into a larger narrative that complements and absorbs the one Mitski has designed. She is currently writing the music for a Broadway adaptation of the chess melodrama The Queen's Gambit, and these songs carry strong show tune energy. Augmenting her touring band with horns and strings, Mitski continues to flesh out the theatrical rock that's always been her baseline; some songs recall the Decemberists of The Crane Wife, while others echo Bowie and Queen. Like those predecessors, Mitski sees the power in being a theater kid. Some melodies nod to Broadway, as does Mitski's singing — whether the setting is the torch and twang of "Instead of Here" or the Merseybeat of "Rules," she sings like she's walking to the edge of the proscenium. This is a strategic move, and it works. It secures what could be heard as part of a florid inheritance, connecting Madame Butterfly and Lucia de Lammermoor to Kim in Miss Saigon, and to Julee Cruise soundtracking the high weirdness of the David Lynch-iverse.
Listening to these songs on repeat, I recalled the words of the philosopher Catherine Clément in her foundational feminist work Opera, or the Undoing of Woman: "Look at these heroines. With their voices they flap their wings, their arms writhe, and then there they are, dead, on the ground. Look at these women who fill the theater, accompanied by penguins in uniforms that scarcely vary: they are present, they are decorative. They are present for the dispatch of women like themselves." Clément's work exposed opera as the site of women's sacrifice, where fully realized characters were done in by their own desires, dying because their excess of feeling could not be accommodated within society's "harsh laws of family and politics." The pleasure the audience experiences, paradoxically, makes these sacrifices acceptable; in this way, theatrical tragedies of women's obliteration help maintain the sexist status quo. These heroines wail, but they die, and once silenced, they can no longer disturb.
Nothing's About to Happen to Me asks listeners to go inside the wail, to think of it as a tool that built a house where wronged women, unreliable women, can express themselves without fear of being struck by the lightning of the social order. They are unreliable because they are wronged — even the mad ones were driven to extremity by callous men and the patriarchy that enables them. Mitski addresses this legacy directly in the shoegazey, strings-laden "Dead Women," which starts with a real zinger: "Would you have liked me better if I'd died, so you could tell my story?" she mutters to an ex — but also to all the male authors and myth-makers who've so often and gleefully murdered their own main characters. As she imagines the slaughter such a man would inflict upon her, Mitski gives her spirit a way out; as he stabs her, she tells him, she will be dreaming of flying. This is the paradox that makes this album and many of Mitski's songs so powerful — her stories often revolve around women who are debased by love or other catastrophes, but the grandeur of her sound, cultivating show-stopping crescendos within rock's fields of noise, renders these violated women victorious, transcendent.
Though death obsessed, Mitski's narrators live on, loudly. They luxuriate in big bass lines and thumping drums. They make jokes and reckon with themselves. Listening to Death's song but refusing to let it pull her under, within these personae Mitski modulates between the seductive screams of an unreliable, tragic, out of control heroine and the self-preserving clarity of one who grasps that she's being gaslit by the architects of her own feminine inheritance. In the fairy tale she tells in "Charon's Obol," a song named after the coins placed on the eyelids or in the mouth of the dead to grant them safe passage to the underworld, her heroine — having escaped her own mad scene — dedicates herself to feeding the dogs of other "dead girls" who had inhabited her house in earlier times. She imagines herself to be that death penny who can free the ghosts of her lost sisters and heal the spirit of the house, which, it turns out, is the world itself. She will carry them on her back if she has to; she will remember them. They can rely on her.
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