“For this album, I was insistent on having it be a rock band,” Mitski tells Apple Music of her eighth record Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. “I was like, ‘I want it to be stripped down. I want it to feel like an album from me 10 years ago.’ But then, once we demoed it, it was like the songs—it sounds woo-woo—but the songs were really asking for more.” And so that rock-band energy was switched out for lush live instrumentation (provided by the band she toured 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We with) and an orchestra, the songs growing into, as the singer-songwriter puts it, a “monstrosity of all these different instruments.” Some of Nothing’s About to Happen to Me does sound like it could have been from 10 years ago—see the pacing, anxious “Where’s My Phone?” or “If I Leave” and “Lightning,” either of which might have appeared on 2016’s Puberty 2. But most of this record feels like a natural next step from The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We and its sweeping country- and Americana-inspired sound. And “monstrosity” is a just a bit self-effacing: The songs here are among the most absorbing of Mitski’s career so far, so rich and full that it sometimes feels like they could burst. But Nothing’s About to Happen to Me still bears all the hallmarks of a very personal-feeling, very Mitski record. Not that she knew that when she was going into it. Because what any album is about, says Mitski, only comes to her once it’s finished. “With my albums, I’ve always sort of like written in a loose way until I finally collect enough songs to make an album, and then that makes the album,” she says. “And the thing is, I never really write thematically. I’m always a mystery to myself. I look at the songs I wrote and I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s a pattern here. That’s interesting.’ I try to piece together what it all means as a collective.” Much of the record navigates the end of a relationship, with Mitski wondering if she’ll ever find anyone as well-suited to her again (“If I Leave”), imagining herself left alone with her cats (and maybe one day abandoned by them too) on “Cats,” and, on the beautifully devastating, bossa-nova-inspired “I’ll Change for You,” promising to shift who she is to keep the relationship alive. “For this song, I just wanted to write something for those pitiful moments where we’ve all been and it’s okay because we’re all human,” she says of the track. “This is kind of the bargaining stage. You know it’s over, but you’re still like, ‘What if I change for you? What if I changed all these things about me so that you’ll like me again?’” Elsewhere, there’s a desire to disappear—whether through scrolling and disassociating on “Where’s My Phone?,” finding peace and solitude while swimming on “In a Lake,” or going somewhere where she can’t be found on “Instead of Here.” You might interpret Mitski’s initial desire to make her eighth album a rock record that feels like it was made in another, perhaps simpler era as a pushback against where she’s got to as an artist: the viral fame, the frequent “best songwriter of her generation” accolades, the intense fandom she seems to attract—all of which Mitski Miyawaki has grappled with publicly and explored in her music (as on 2022’s burnout-driven Laurel Hell). You might equally interpret the fact that Nothing’s About to Happen to Me turned out grander than she expected—or than much of what Mitski has put out before—as a sign that she burns far too bright to go backwards or just shrink away. And that, actually, she might just be enjoying all of this after all. Mitski’s trademark dark wit shines through on the daft, laugh-out-loud “That White Cat,” on which Mitski sings, “I see him through my window/The white neighborhood cat marking my house/It’s supposed to be my house/But I guess, according to cats, now it’s his house.” Laughing, says Mitski, is as powerful for combatting her angst as anything else. “That’s a coping mechanism, right? That’s just how I figure out how to get through my day each day,” she says. “It’s just like, laugh at it.”