Track of the week: Mitski returns in a fit of apathetic mania on ‘Where’s My Phone?’
At the end of every Mitski era, the same question always pops up – ‘Is this it?’
After the release of Laurel Hell in 2022, it really seemed like it was as the singer directly confronted her conflicting and often disappointed feelings towards music making on that record, signing it off with a song that felt like a goodbye. In 2023, the worry sparked up again after her latest record when she shut down the operation of her merch store and disappeared again.
But as has always been the case, no matter how quiet the artist goes and no matter for how long, art always seems to draw her back. The pattern is the same – her career becomes overwhelming as each never release brings about a swell of fans, touring becomes overbearing, she disappears, her fans panic just as much as she does, and then, one day, she returns. “It was a real joy to be like, ‘Oh, phew, I can write again. Thank God’”, she told the BBC about the feeling of new songs appearing to her once again.
Another predictable behaviour is Mitski’s unpredictability. Every new return brings a new form. I’ve always joked that my friend Nancy, who goes by the artist name Mouse Teeth, should be on commission as Mitski’s most powerful marketing asset. In my personal life, my entire friendship group was turned onto the artist by Nancy who, by this point, feels like a Mitski scholar.
She knew before I did that the artist was returning this week, spotting the signs before the industry was even notified. When I hinted to her that the early listen I got was nothing like what you might expect, she basically told me that that’s exactly what you should always expect from Mitski.
So when the artist last left us with The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, a dark, theatrical and downtrodden record about existential dread, finishing with one of her sparsest tracks yet, ‘I Love Me After You’, the return with an all-out rock song could never have been predicted – and so is perfectly on form for her.
‘Where’s My Phone?’ is all guitars. It’s a rock band playing in a garage, sounding like the type of tune that would have provided the perfect theme tune for a 1990s or early 2000s TV show, with its likeness to Harvey Danger’s ‘Flagpole Sitta’, best known as the Peep Show theme tune, an inescapable itch in my head.
But as Danger sings “Paranoia, paranoia, everybody’s coming to get me,” Mitski’s tune is gripped by the same panic from the opposite direction. “I keep thinking, ‘Surely, somebody will save me’, At every turn, I learn that no one will,” she sings, capturing the 2020s terrified apathy, needing a hero, knowing one will never come, so surrendering to doomscrolling TikTok instead.
As she announced her eighth album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, that state gains a narrative, casting Mitski as a reclusive woman who is a deviant menace in the outside world, but is calm and free in her mania inside.
Presented alongside a perfectly unhinged music video, Mitski seems to have accepted that there’s no easy way for an artist to capture or engage with the modern world without dissolving into a bit of insanity.
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