The cyclical nature of album releases invites reflection as much as it encourages the consumption of new music. With the standard format being the release of albums every two to three years for mainstream musicians, the span between releases can encompass massive changes in one’s life and how we encounter artists. This is especially vivid when it is an artist we have been longtime fans of, whose music charts our lives and relationships.
This feeling has been pronounced with the release of Mitski’s latest album, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me.” The time since her last album, 2023’s “The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We,” has been a fraught one for many and the reflection it inspires is equal parts joyful and anguishing, at everything that has happened and everything that hasn’t. “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” has a similar twin response to life’s changes and one’s response to them.
The songs are subtler in this than in previous albums, which were so taut with desire it felt as though Mitski was being pulled in two different cardinal directions. There isn’t the explosiveness of the songs “Remember My Name,” “Come into the Water,” “Washing Machine Heart,” “Bug Like an Angel” and “The Deal” or her earlier unyielding album ”Bury Me at Makeout Creek.” The songs on “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” are a mash-up of alt-rock and folk-country, with the heart in the lyrics rather than the instrumentation and composition. They are more straightforward and consistent, but they are anything but simple. They are unwieldy and slippery and as soon as it feels like one has a grip on the songs and album, Mitski makes a precise shift that obfuscates them.
One element typical of Mitski is the rising tension in the opening track, also found on many of her previous albums. Here, “In a Lake” reflects on the pressures to leave behind your hometown and its memories, but questions the desire to forget it all: “But in a lake, you can backstroke forever / The sky before you, the dark right behind / And in a big city, you can start over.” It relishes in the beauty and peace that can be found among memories and is disquieted by the sounds of city streets featured on the track and its lack of history, its requirement to form yourself anew to find a place within it.
Along with its theme of memory and growth, the album is notable for its repeated usage of animals, especially cats, in the songs “Cats,” “That White Cat” and “Charon’s Obol.” She references felines as “a rescue” amid a breakup in “Cats” and a symbol of control in “That White Cat” and evokes dogs as the remnants of memories and people that follow us in “Charon’s Obol.”
It is impossible to mention this inclusion of cats throughout the album without thinking of the uproar during the 2024 presidential election on Vice President J.D. Vance’s 2021 remark that disparaged Democrat leaders as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” Mitski does not create characters that are satisfied with where they are, but the decisions they make and the realities they must face are in sharp contrast to a conservative agenda that has attempted to wrest power from women and subject them to a heightened patriarchy.
The allusion is not overblown, nor does she specifically address these political issues. Instead, her songs are a paean to women who are unsure of their desires, while never questioning their right to form their own paths.
The things that we drag behind us, unwittingly or not, are another image frequently deployed in the album. Whereas Mitski focused on the moment just before love is lost in previous albums, here she considers the breakup in more detail. The characters on many of the songs are in retreat, looking for a place to lick their wounds and face what has caused the loss of love on both sides. “If I Leave” is a fantastic example of this lyrical emotional calculation, considering whether or not it is worth continuing a lopsided secret relationship that nonetheless has love in it.
The themes that are woven throughout the album are done with a deft hand and reward repeated listening, not least for the many allusions to earlier songs, such as those between her song “Brand New City” and “In A Lake” as well as “I Will” and “If I Leave.”
Amid an exceptional discography, ”Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” does not stand out as much on the first listen. Still, it will surely grow on fans and newcomers alike sooner rather than later and be recognized as one of many great 2026 releases.