On “Where’s My Phone?,” the second track on Mitski’s eighth studio album, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” she sings, “I just want my mind to be a clear glass / Clear glass with nothing in my head.” The lyric serves as a thesis statement of sorts for a concept album that is as much an immersive literary experience as an exercise in listening. Mitski is the writer of these songs, but the speaker is someone else, a reclusive woman who resides in an unkempt house. The album’s dispatches from her secluded life style are propelled by the question of who is doing the looking and what that looking reveals about the experience of an other. Before she wishes to have a clear mind, for example, the narrator is berated by a woman on the street, who calls her a “ditch on my block.” On “In a Lake,” the speaker insists that she’d never live in a small town, because “everywhere you go makes your heart ache.” We come to understand that the outside world does not favor the speaker, who is perceived to have a type of strangeness about her. But when the lens shifts toward the interior, articulating the woman’s private monologues, the attitude is softer and more generous, even when her words seem steeped in a sense of ongoing dread. This woman, when sequestered in her house, feels more at peace than she could ever feel in the world beyond her door.

Mitski, now thirty-five, has always written songs of exceptional rawness and vulnerability, placing herself in closeup against a thin layer of glass. Her lyrical explorations of navigating a deeply feeling heart earned her a reputation as an indie bard of melancholy and loneliness, and fans, in turn, forged an intense parasocial relationship with her. In response, Mitski became immensely protective of her privacy. (In a New York profile from 2022, she refused to share the names of her cats, concerned that fans might use the information to track her down.) In an era when sharing your art tends to mean giving yourself to the public, Mitski has become about as reclusive as a musician of her stature can be, which makes the distance between the speaker’s concerns and the writer’s concerns, on “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” perhaps not so wide after all (though, as a person who writes poems, I tend to think that the exact distance is hardly any of the public’s business).

Mitski’s sound and writing style have evolved on almost every album she’s released. Her early album “Retired from Sad, New Career in Business,” from 2013, relied on big orchestral swells alongside electronics. Her breakout, “Bury Me at Makeout Creek,” released the following year, felt at times like a punk-rock sprint of guitar and drumbeats. On “Be the Cowboy,” her 2018 album, her production was more lush and full without wholly abandoning her flair for fuzzy and distorted guitar work. “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is a bit of a mashup of many of Mitski’s past endeavors, featuring big orchestral swings and moments of loud, frantic guitar, but its formal ambitions feel secondary to its expansive lyrical themes. On a line level, the songwriting comes alive with imagery and ache, such as on the album-closing song, “Lightning”—“When I die / Could I come back as the rain?” But the most fascinating quality of “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is how Mitski manages to embody an “I” with the full sense and spirit of a wonderfully complicated central character who is orbiting heartbreak and loss. In the song “Cats,” the narrator anticipates the absence of someone she still loves, a void being filled by two cats who sleep in bed with her at night. “Instead of Here” opens with a knock on the door and the woman depressed and lying on the floor instead of answering, with “death crouchin’ ” beside her. On “I’ll Change for You,” a listener overhears the woman on a drunken phone call, insisting that she’d do anything to be loved again—that she’s willing to change, to become whoever is needed to make the person return.

Despite how abject all this sounds, the protagonist does not seem weak or worthy of pity. Contrary to what she is enduring and expressing, she is rendered as someone who possesses a level of control. As the album proceeds, the lens shifts: she isn’t the one who is on the verge of madness; the world is, and she is one of the few people with the good sense to stay away from it as much as she can. The album’s concern is one that has shaped my own life and the lives of many people I know: when the world is increasingly inhospitable, is isolating oneself that irrational of a response? Mitski has no answer or illuminating moment that will make plain sense of this question for you, but the song “That White Cat,” propelled by churning percussion, perhaps provides a clue. The woman watches from her window as a neighborhood cat marks her house—a house that, she acknowledges, now pretty well belongs to the cat. At first, she insists, she has to go to work to pay for the cat’s house. Then again, to pay for the house is to pay for the wasp who lives in the roof, for the family of possums, for the bugs who will drink her blood, and for the birds who will eat those bugs, only to be killed by the cat. There is a thin border between isolation and loneliness, and, even if you retreat from the world, you are still in it. ♦