‘Nothing’s About To Happen To Me’: The five most devastating lyrics from the new Mitski album
If there’s one thing we can always count on, it’s that a new Mitski album brings along with it a whole new language for emotional devastation. No matter the topic, whether it’s love, loss or even eco-existentialism, the writer always seems to find a unique angle to get right to the centre of the heart.
On her latest offering, Nothing’s About To Happen To Me, the pen seems sharper than ever. Across 11 tracks, Mitski clings to a relationship at the end of its line, sees her knuckles go white, and grieves the loss. It features pure poetry as her fans would expect, but there’s also a plain-speaking element to it as she lays feelings out flat to be able to inspect them.
In Far Out’s four-star review of the record, Kelly Murphy wrote, “It’s one you have to sit with a few times, each listen giving you more and more to appreciate, even though you already know from the first listen that this is undoubtedly the singer at her best and most creative.”
Now, a few listens in, the album has done exactly that, offering up a new and shiny lyric of pure feeling with each repeat.
If you’re currently going through a breakup or feel one brewing, take this as your official warning. Proceed with caution here, as Mitski is about to narrate corners of your mind you might not be up for diving into right now.
The five most devastating lyrics from the new Mitski album:
‘Rules’
“And when I lеave my body / Please pretend that you don’t see / How I’m no longer there behind my eyes”.
Album by album, disassociation always creeps back into Mitski’s lyricism. Specifically, the upsetting relationship between intimacy, trauma and disassociation comes in as on the 2016 track ‘I Bet On Losing Dogs’, she sang “How you’d be over me / Looking in my eyes when I cum / Someone to watch me die”. Or in 2018, on ‘A Pearl’, she put it excruciatingly bluntly, singing of her sexual disconnect as simply “There’s a hole that you fill”.
On ‘Rules’, she’s basically saying the same thing, instructing a new suitor to simply ignore her pain, and to act like they can’t even see it. In a song about rejoining the dating world, or at least the hook-up world, after a devastating heartbreak, it’s another familiar feeling put painstakingly bluntly.
‘Dead Women’
“She gave her life so we could have her in our dreams / She gave her life so we could fuck her as we please”.
The devastation of Mitski’s latest offering isn’t just relegated to heartbreak, though. On ‘Dead Women’, she tears into wider society, the voice of women and the lack of agency they have about their narrative. For part of the song, it seems like she’s talking about celebrity, singing, “Would you have liked me better if I’d died so you could tell my story the way it ought to be?” It’s reminiscent of the generations of famous women who haven’t had the voice to tell their story, only for someone else to swoop in and tell it falsely for them.
But as the song goes on, the narrative expands to include all women, famous or not, and the familiar pain of having someone rewrite the truth of a situation into a story that makes them look better, whether it be painting them out as the villain of a breakup, or making the woman seem mad or erase responsibility. It’s a bitter, sour song about the familiar bad taste women are so often left with in their mouths, forced to chew it.
‘Cats’
“So I’ve been trying to stop trying / To be like someone you’d still like / Maybe if I could, you already would”.
On ‘Cats’, Mitski looks at a failing relationship through a unique lens, the eyes of her cats. It represents a pretty intense state of pity as she feels like her cats are paying more attention to her, spending the night by her side, as if they can sense the distance growing between the partners.
But at its core, ‘Cats’ is a devastated song about wanting to change for someone, or mostly about wanting someone’s affection and approval. Here, Mitski sings about the effort she’s always put in to making her partner like her, only to land at the harsh reality that it’s not enough.
‘I’ll Change For You’
“If you don’t like me now / I will change for you”.
‘I’ll Change For You’ appears as ‘Cats’ spiritual sister; if ‘Cats’ is the devastation in the quiet of the night, ‘I’ll Change For You’ is the desperation of a drunken one with Mitski singing, “Yeah, I’ve been drinking / Why’s that gotta mean / I can’t call you ’bout you and me?”
In one of the album’s most out-right gut-punches, Mitski says exactly what anyone who has ever gone through a heartbreak has thought, laying it out flat when she says matter-of-factly, “I will change for you”. Everyone knows the desperation of that statement, but also everyone knows it doesn’t work, only upping the weight of the blow.
‘If I Leave’
“If I leave, somebody else will find you / But nobody else could see me / Quite as clearly as you”.
If you have a feeling that your relationship might be ending, or you’re starting to hear that voice in your head telling you to leave it, proceed with caution on this song. Tackling the obsessive, overwhelming mental mathematics of feeling like you need to leave a relationship, Mitski does all the equations in song on ‘If I Leave’, zig-zagging between factual logic and emotional chaos.
Again, the pain comes from relatability. The bottom line of the song is that well-known smothering sense that you need to leave a relationship, but then the silencing panic that you may never find love like it again. Pushing her listeners through that painful back and forth along with her, it’s just as stressful a song as it is in life, mixing instinct and self-pity in a sickening mix.
