“I don’t like my thoughts/I don’t like being left alone in a room,” Mitski sings on her seventh album, her voice honeyed and wealthy regardless of her misery. “Please don’t take … this job from me.” We may learn this as your common American workaholic, consumed by the grind. Nevertheless it’s exhausting to not hear these phrases as autobiographical — in any case, this is identical lady who determined to give up music, then got here again, drawn to it just like the tides to the moon. As she advised Rolling Stone in 2021: “That is who I’m.… I’m going to maintain getting damage, and I’m nonetheless going to do it, as a result of that is the one factor I can do.’ ”
When Mitski broke out in 2016 together with her wonderful Puberty 2, listeners latched onto her private but deeply relatable songwriting, her singularly emotive voice, and her music’s uncooked depth. Her 2018 Be the Cowboy was extra polished, however nonetheless managed to really feel like a intestine punch. The synth-heavy Laurel Hell, her 2022 return after ostensibly quitting music, grappled together with her standing as indie royalty.
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is one other evolution: a mixture of quotidian-yet-elliptical lyricism, basic nation accompaniment, daring orchestral actions, and the musician’s distinctive model of storytelling. Mitski channels pictures of affection, nostalgia, and the aftertaste of disappointment into a group of impressionistic vignettes steeped in rural loneliness, like an arty singer-songwriter replace of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
The document begins with quiet acoustic guitar on “Bug Like an Angel,” through which the music’s narrator eases right into a whiskey haze till consuming begins to “really feel like household” — the ultimate phrase punctuated by a choir that appears like a Greek refrain. “Buffalo Changed” evokes frontiersmen taking pictures at animals from freight-train home windows; guitars and drums churn just like the wheels of a locomotive, and Mitski’s voice rises like a practice whistle, earlier than ending on a picture of small-town desolation. Songs like “Heaven” and “My Love Mine All Mine,” are goth-country epics. “The Deal” is simply as darkly transcendent, with the music’s narrator imagining her soul anthropomorphized as a hen as drums roll just like the beating of wings.
Mitski merges her tales with American archetypes. “When Reminiscences Snow” recollects a showdown in a spaghetti Western, however as a substitute of gunslingers, we’ve a hero battling recollections that smother her like snow. “The Frost” appears to be Mitski’s reply to Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Might Cry,” whereas “I’m Your Man” is a homicide ballad of types, phrases of devotion morphing into menace.
It isn’t all hopeless. The album closes on a personality who appears very like Mitski herself, alone in her room on the slinky observe “I Love Me After You,” which is as cool because the water she drinks within the music after brushing her hair, spritzing toner, and settling again into her pores and skin. “Let the darkness see me,” she intones. “I’m king of all of the land.” Regardless of the album’s title, that land doesn’t appear all that inhospitable in any case.
