Photo: Ebru Yildiz
Para-social relationships with public figures have been thoroughly exacerbated by the advent of the internet, and around the release of her last album, I decided I didn’t really like Mitski.
She’s known for being vocal about her dislike of fame, and, a few years on, what seemed ungrateful now reads as someone genuinely struggling with it all. It helps that her new album is fantastic, continuing to explore those feelings of alienation while taking her music in lush new directions.
There’s nothing particularly special about the four chords that make up ‘Bug Like an Angel’, but just listening to them strummed is compelling enough, even before they’re complemented by a string section and keyboard. This album is full of moments like that, modest on the surface but imbued with deeper meaning.
It’s the album’s first track, and starts by noting that the bug stuck to her glass looks like an angel when refracted through the last sips of her drink. She goes on to muse that "sometimes a drink feels like family".
Around the time a choir joined in to harmonise that last word, I realised I was in for something really special.
In 2019 Mitski said she was done playing live indefinitely. ‘This is a Life’, a song she co-wrote with David Byrne, was nominated for an Oscar, but she declined to perform at the ceremony. She swore off social media entirely. Then earlier this year she announced she’d renegotiated with her label, and would keep making albums.
This new one is as wracked with angst as ever, but counterintuitively, it sounds effortless, familiar forms shot through with sincerity.
The album’s country-adjacent palette is consistent, serene save for occasional bursts of urgent orchestration or moments of drama. Sometimes that’s almost comically overt on tracks like ‘I Don’t Like My Mind’, despite Mitski’s undeniably beautiful vocal performance.
Basing your chorus on the line “A whole cake, all for me” then following it with “Then I get sick and throw up” seems like a pretty clear wink at the audience, but when she sings about moments of being alone with her mind, “with all its opinions about the things that I've done”... well, I know what she means.
On ‘The Frost’ she imagines she’s the last human on a deserted planet, with the frost looking like a layer of dust that’s settled on everything. She’s initially happy, then realises there’s no one to share her memories of things like frost with.
The lyrics on this album are so hyper-self-aware I couldn’t help but be won over, and regardless, it’s consistently gorgeous. If her last album felt like someone forcing themselves to experiment, this one does away with that almost entirely, instead letting her songs breathe and swell with their own internal rhythms, effortless and agonised all at once.
