Mitski offers up a rapturous collection of roiling introspections on her new album The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. She’s also announced a series of North American tour dates in support of the release, including three nights at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on March 28-30th. Ask anyone who’s caught her live and they’ll tell you she’s not one to miss — her music finds its most sublime realization when she performs onstage.
With her seventh studio album, Mitski finds herself adrift within a swell of oceanic emotion, bobbing earnestly over tidal waves of orchestral splendor and diving to the depths of disquietingly honest reflections.
It begins with “Bug Like an Angel,” where she tempers her talent for eviscerating personal elucidation — “As I got older, I learned I’m a drinker / Sometimes, a drink feels like family” — with the revitalizing harmonies of an ethereal 17-person choir. “When I’m bent over wishin’ it was over / Makin’ all variety of vows I’ll never keep,” she sings, wrestling with the woefully thin line between mercy and fury. “I try to remember the wrath of the devil / Was also given him by God.”
Her gentle melancholy bleeds into “Buffalo Replaced” as she stands in her backyard shrouded by darkness, observing flickers of life and the roar of sound that echoes within such solitude. Here, hope is not a thing with feathers but rather a self-sustaining and immobile personification. One that she admits, “feeds herself while I’m away.” However, that doesn’t prevent her from seeing such hope as a yoke: “Sometimes I think it would be easier without her.”
Mitski’s deep influence via spaghetti Western soundtracks makes an appearance amidst the pained pleas of “I Don’t Like My Mind,” where twanging guitars warble behind sonorous atmospherics as she laments: “I don’t like my mind, I don’t like being left alone in a room / With all its opinions about the things that I’ve done / So, yeah, I blast music loud, and I work myself to the bone.” On “When Memories Snow” a breathtaking crescendo of horns and woodwinds punctuates her laborious fear of the memories that inundate her existence — the past amassing as a physical obstruction that must be defeated before one can move on.
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Yet, her most searing but beautiful ruminations come from reckonings with love. The lulling instrumental melodies of “Heaven” toss and turn soothingly as Mitski savors the safety of companionship. Yet she still finds herself beckoned to the chaos of freedom: “Hear the storm / Dances outside / Something set free / Is runnin’ through the night.” The dreamy lullaby “My Love Mine All Mine” avows with heartfelt sincerity a protective guardianship over one’s love as she coos: “Nothing in the world belongs to me / But my love, mine, all mine, all mine.”
As the album’s title suggests, living in a dying world is sometimes just as arduous as attempting to live with oneself — let alone others. Reeling through her existential odyssey, Mitski finds herself yearning for a revitalizing faith in love. “I’m yours, no matter / That love’s gone / We just see it shinin’,” she sings “On Star,” before asking desperately, “Isn’t that worth holdin’ on?”
Even as she finds herself haunted by the cataclysm that occurs when two people, like celestial bodies, collide. While the album’s final two tracks — “I’m Your Man” and the stoically triumphant “I Love Me After You” — confront those realities with poetic intensity.
See Mitski at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on March 28-30th.
Visit Mitski on their website, TikTok, and Instagram to stay updated on new releases and tour announcements.
Words: Steven Ward
Listen to The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We the new album from Mitski below!
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