Shrouded in a layer of cosmic frost and effervescent vocals, Mitski’s latest album, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” seems as if it were conjured up during a lamp-lit walk over railway tracks and through lush cicada hymns. Emerging from her usual curtain of synth-pop angst and distortion guitar rage is a strikingly organic sound that feels like a newfound, albeit long-awaited, sigh of relief. Flanked by barking dogs, freight train hisses, seraphic choral veils and sweeping orchestral constructions, it is both a resurrection and a haunting.
Released on Sept. 15, Mitski’s seventh studio album comes a little more than a year after “Laurel Hell,” a punctuated ’80s electro-rock lament of the artist’s fraught relationship with the anonymizing knife that is the music industry. Amidst rumors of retirement that began circulating in 2019, the singer-songwriter found peace in Nashville, Tenn., where “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” was recorded. And in typical Mitski fashion, her alchemical songwriting paints an immersive picture of the droning fuzziness of the surrounding countryside that bleeds into the album’s contemporary folk mystique.
Infused with the orchestral mirth of Angel Olsen and the atmospheric ambiance of Sea Oleena, Mitski straddles the borderlands of wilderness and the human condition. Her voice, despite its soft-leather musk, ripples a tremor that translates as watery echoes rather than submerged screams (her infamous Tiny Desk performance of “Class of 2013” immediately comes to mind). The solidarity that most find in her music — which feels more like turning a blade within oneself — has now flowered into a deep-rooted and introspective comfort. The “tall child” of “First Love/Late Spring” still remains as pensive as ever, only now her existentialism has found celestial solace in a previously godless land.
Mitski’s landscape is inhabited by themes she’s traversed before — self-deprecation and aching desire are familiar fauna — as seen in tracks like “I’m Your Man” and “The Deal.” In the former, she contemplates power as she sings, “You’re an angel, I’m a dog.” The latter, set to a chugging railroad beat and sealed with sonorous violin, follows a desperate bargaining with an eerie songbird: “I want someone to take this soul / I can’t bear to keep it.” Yet the path forks, or more so ascends, as she wills herself up from the dredges of earthly agonies and into the arms of nature and vatic deities.
Making space for her breath in tracks like “Heaven” and “Buffalo Replaced,” she quiets, “But here, in our place, we have for the day / Can we stay for a while and listen for heaven?” and makes herself malleable in the hands of the landscape: “Now I bend like a willow thinking of you / Like a murmuring brook curving about you.” Channeling the stirring force of “I Don’t Smoke,” she pounds her chest to “Streets are mine, the night is mine” in “I Love Me After You.” And in the hushed vespers of “Star,” she makes a cosmic promise to a lover — “Keep a leftover light burning, so you can keep looking up / Isn’t that worth holding on?”
“My Love Mine All Mine,” the seventh track and undoubtedly my favorite, has a delicate grace about its lyrical simplicity and fragile instrumentation. Despite its brevity, it materializes streams of moonlight and bird murmurations, an evocation that undulates with soft piano runs and her jazzy low register. Pulling poetry from a page and putting it to a shimmering backtrack, she begins with, “Moon a hole of light, through the big top tent up high,” and the alliterative staccato feels like raindrops on face turned towards an unyielding sky. “My baby here on earth, showed me what my heart was worth,” she swoons, going on to serenade the moon herself: “So when it comes to be my turn, could you shine it down here for her?” Half elegy and half ballad, Mitski exalts love as the greatest act one can accomplish in this lifetime that shall persist long after we’ve returned to dust.
When I think about what I adore most about this track, I think of idiophones. Any instrument that produces sounds primarily from its own body (rather than from strings or membranes or electricity) is classified as such. A vibration that comes from being shaken, struck, scraped — a sort of stoic reeling in the wind. The loneliness that strikes in “Bury Me at Makeout Creek,” the shaking tremors of alienation in “Puberty 2” and the scraping bellows of “Retired from Sad, New Career in Business” have coalesced into the vibrating newness of her romantic realization: “Nothing in the world belongs to me, but my love, mine all mine.” Its body, while still harboring glimmers of past pinings, has an unadorned wholeness that speaks entirely for itself.
Deeply, deeply human, yet wondrously surreal, Mitski weaves a loom of the quotidien while dreaming of a spectral fate. Domesticity, suffering, mortality, being and love inhabit a rugged terrain dusted with “memories like snow,” beckoning us to shuffle on through the wilderness. The land is inhospitable, infinitely gentle and infinitely suffering, and we live in spite of it.
