Mitski is teasing the release of her eighth studio album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, with a mysterious phone number and website. When you ring the Pecos, Texas-based line, you won’t find any musical snippets — just Mitski reading a quote from Shirley Jackson’s chilling 1959 horror classic, The Haunting of Hill House. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,” she says. “Even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
That phantasmagoric quote sets the tone of Mitski’s next record, which is out Feb. 27 via Dead Oceans. It’s a “rich narrative whose main character is a reclusive woman in an unkempt house. Outside of her home, she is a deviant; inside of her home, she is free,” according to the press release, which is purposely scant on the details — although the phone website features texts that reference white cats, pies, and Grey Gardens, the iconic documentary about a mother and daughter named Edie and their reclusive, glamorously decaying life.
Instead of laying out her vision in too many words, the musician welcomes us into her world with the first single and accompanying video, “Where’s My Phone?” It’s based on another mind-bending novel by Jackson, 1962’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The anxiety-inducing visual, directed by Noel Paul, sees Mitski stepping into Jackson’s world, in which two sisters retreat from public life after one of them is accused of poisoning the rest of the family.
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When a man enters the picture, that isolation comes under threat and all hell breaks loose — imagery that matches the jittery, unnerving track, in which Mitski repeatedly asks, “Where did it go/Where’s my phone/Where’s my phone,” yearning for her mind to be “like a clear glass.” It’s a tone similar to that of her previous album, 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, which echoed with rural loneliness — there’s just a distinct frenzy to the music now.
Produced and engineered by her longtime collaborator Patrick Hyland and mastered by Bob Weston, the album was written and performed by Mitski, along with her touring band.