Mitski: Nothing's About to Happen to Me review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

"Last month, Mitski released Where's My Phone?, the first single from her eighth album Nothing's About to Happen to Me. Its raging alt-rock is a more robust take on the lo-fi fuzz of her third album Bury Me at Makeout Creek, while UK listeners might detect a certain Britpoppy swing about its rhythm, and it ends with a guitar solo so jarringly distorted it sounds as if something is wrong with the stream."

"It was accompanied by a video that featured the singer as a headscarf-sporting rural mother, trying to protect her family from the attentions of the outside world with increasing violence: a milkman gets attacked, her daughter's potential suitor is beaten bloody. It's both funny and unsettling; there are references to Rapunzel, Grey Gardens, Grant Wood's American Gothic and Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle a litany of the wilfully isolated."

"The visuals set the tone for the rest of Nothing's About to Happen to Me, an album on which you're never far from its author expressing a longing to disappear; to be, as she puts it on Instead of Here, where nobody can reach. On opener In a Lake, she extols moving to the city from a small town, not in search of bright lights and excitement, but obscurity, a means of obliterating your own history:"

Last month, Mitski released Where's My Phone?, the first single from her eighth album Nothing's About to Happen to Me. The single's raging alt-rock updates the lo-fi fuzz of Bury Me at Makeout Creek with Britpoppy rhythmic touches and a jarringly distorted guitar solo. The video depicts a headscarf-sporting rural mother protecting her family with escalating violence, referencing Rapunzel, Grey Gardens, Grant Wood's American Gothic and Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The album repeatedly expresses a longing to disappear. Songs like In a Lake, Instead of Here, I'll Change for You and Rules juxtapose anonymity-seeking lyrics with richly orchestrated, contrasting musical backings. Mitski's relationship with celebrity is fraught.

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