Mitski's eighth album is nearly upon us

Huge news for yearners, loners, and freaks everywhere (and I count myself among the ranks of all three): Mitski has not only announced her eighth studio album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, but shared its lead single, “Where’s My Phone?” The new record—out February 27 via Dead Oceans—follows 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We and continues its musical through line, while shifting the emotional terrain inward, from open landscapes to something tighter, stranger, and more claustrophobic.

“Where’s My Phone?” arrives fuzzed-out and anxious, built around a looping spiral of disorientation rather than a traditional hook. Mitski’s repeated questions—“Where did it go?” “Where’d I go?”—blur together as the song swells from chugging indie rock into an orchestral haze, suggesting a mind pacing the same room over and over. The track is accompanied by an artfully chaotic video directed by Noel Paul, loosely inspired by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in which Mitski plays a paranoid woman defending a gothic house against a parade of increasingly absurd intrusions.

I’ll never complain about a new Mitski album, but it’s been a minute since a single of hers has made me feel this jolt of anticipation. Admittedly, I’m an early-Mitski truther—Puberty 2, the criminally underrated Lush, and Bury Me at Makeout Creek forever—and “Where’s My Phone?” taps directly into that lineage: all chugging, fuzzed-out guitars, now supercharged by the expanded production palette of her later work. It’s haunting and surreal, gradually tipping into cathartic heavy distortion, and it hints at Mitski leaning back into rock textures in a way she hasn’t quite done since before 2018’s (excellent) Be the Cowboy. (Also, as a perennial sucker for that part in Hop Along’s “Texas Funeral” where Frances Quinlan repeatedly screams, “None of this is gonna happen to me”—and as someone who may or may not have titled their college poetry thesis after that line in particular—this album name feels catered to me specifically. Thank you, Mitski).