Lately, I’ve been diving into books about women on the brink — Penelope Mortimer’s *The Pumpkin Eater*, Raymond Kennedy’s *Ride A Cockhorse*, D. G. Compton’s *The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe* (thanks to my New York Review Of Books obsession) — and I’ve been seeing a lot of Mitski in these stories.
Or rather, I’ve been noticing similarities with the narrators in Mitski’s songs. They numb themselves with excess and push boundaries to assert control. In her new album, *The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We*, Mitski vividly portrays people in the throes of nervous breakdowns, haunted by their mistakes and unspoken words. “So yeah, I blast my music loud/ And I work myself to the bone/ And on an inconvenient Christmas, I eat a cake/ A whole cake, all for me!” she sings in “I Don’t Like My Mind.” Lines like this are delivered with casual defiance, as her characters express indifference to the consequences of their actions. “Stride through the house naked/ Don’t even care that the curtains are open/ Let the darkness see me,” she sings on the album closer “I Love Me After You,” sauntering through the wreckage of yet another destroyed possibility.
Mitski’s seventh full-length album is simmering and restrained, beholden to nobody. Last year’s *Laurel Hell* felt bound by the surprise viral success of “Nobody,” with its punishingly pulsing ’80s sonic palette. The most successful parts of *Laurel Hell* were its most muted; her new album thankfully follows that thread, recalling the sputtering operatics of “Heat Lightning” or the roiling burbles of “Working For The Knife.” It’s the first Mitski album in a while that doesn’t feel reactive or tangled up in reflections on her career and her complicated relationship with fame. Instead, it feels detached from expectations, as if Mitski is settling into uncompromising mid-career mode, no longer feeling the need to prove anything.
Though *The Land Is Inhospitable* is Mitski’s most intricate, widescreen album to date — utilizing an orchestra, choir, and live-band studio setup — it’s also her most intimate. It’s pointedly low-key in its execution, atmospheric, and quietly confident. The songs are worthy of the complexities of her words.
These songs can be knotty, difficult, and surprising. Take “The Deal,” where Mitski describes a Faustian bargain with a twittering bird she encounters on a long night walk, an exchange that leaves her without a soul but no longer haunted by regret. Yet, a life without regret is no life at all: “Your pain is eased, but you’ll never be free.” A lonesome, scratchy acoustic guitar explodes into pounding drums at the suggestion of relief; the song’s conclusion is overwhelming, as every element introduced sparingly throughout the track converges into a glorious cacophony. She employs a similar strategy on “I’m Your Man,” which starts slow and mournful before its unbearable sadness cracks into a chorus filled with outdoor sounds: frogs croaking, dogs barking, insects chirping, and an ooh ooh refrain that sounds almost prehistoric. “When Memories Snow” is staggering, building to a queasy, baroque swagger that’s feverish in its intensity as she overflows with anxiety: “When memories melt/ I hear them in the drainpipe/ Dripping through the downspout/ As I lie awake in the dark.” From a compositional standpoint, these are some of Mitski’s best songs: moody, glowering, ecstatic, and invigorating in how all the pieces come together so assuredly into an explosive crescendo.
But more often than not, *The Land Is Inhospitable* is gentle, sweeping, and tantalizing in its unresolved tension. It’s her most cohesive work to date, with a mood akin to ice melting in a whiskey glass: crisp, bitterly refreshing. Her heaving sonics work themselves into unexpected places, like on the lurching “Buffalo Replaced,” where she personifies her unshakeable hope as an unattended animal: “She shits where she’s supposed to, feeds herself when I’m away.” The album’s loungey ballads, the twilit “My Love Mine All Mine” and the twangy “Heaven,” are lovely — especially the latter, as Mitski sings of a love that’s cozy even in its absence: “Now I bend like a willow thinking of you/ Like a murmuring brook curving about you/ As I sip on the rest of the coffee you left/ A kiss left of you.” But she saves her most cutting poetics for heartbreak, like the lingering pain of “The Frost”: “You’re my best friend/ Now I’ve no one to tell/ How I lost my best friend/ The frost, it looks/ Like we’ve been left in the attic/ But you’re not here to see/ It’s just witness-less me.”
Mitski is at her most elegantly disturbed on *The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We*. She’s also, contradictorily but not really, at her sweetest and most sentimental — writing songs about falling in and out of love, expressing how we can give all of ourselves for nothing in return or give all of ourselves but only for a little while until we’re left depleted. “That love is like a star/ It’s gone, we just see it shining,” she sings on the celestial “Star,” burning bright before burning out and leaving only a flickering in its wake. “I’m sorry I’m the one you love/ No one will ever love me like you again,” goes the scraping hook on “I’m Your Man.” “So when you leave me, I should die/ I deserve it, don’t I?” The twinges of loneliness, grief, and fleeting happiness that pass through *The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We* more than earn its dramatic title. The name feels almost too modest for an album that so compellingly contemplates the many ways we sabotage ourselves in our relationships, choosing to be cruel when all we want is to be kind.