Mitski likely didn't know the Pandora's Box she was opening while producing her debut album. Though the 2012 LP, Lush, was self-released — and reportedly doubled as a project for her junior year at SUNY Purchase — it carries the grand orchestral drama of a seasoned singer/songwriter, her already clarion vocals bolstered by clever songwriting. Just over a decade later, she's now idolized as a celestial being in a pantheon somewhere between indie pop star, poetic genius, and voice of a generation.
But Mitski's level of success has had its pitfalls. Despite her rather coy image and indie background, Mitski has garnered a rabid following with the stan culture of a stadium-filling act (for one, there's a Twitter account called "mitski's archive" that managed to track down rare footage of her college days). In turn, Mitski's career has often rung with a certain tension and internal conflict — yet, remarkably, the music has always remained transcendent.
Resilience has long been part of Mitski's journey, even before she realized she could turn to music as an outlet. Born in Japan to a Japanese mother and American father, Mitsuki Miyawaki spent much of her youth traveling internationally because of her father's job. Having to do that over and over — let alone as a mixed-race, Japanese-American child dropped into the Czech Republic or the Democratic Republic of Congo — was likely bewildering. But music gave some sense of home, of certainty: "Whenever she was lonely in a new house or city or country, she'd walk around and hum invented fragments of melody," Margaret Talbot wrote in a profile of Mitski for The New Yorker.
But still, she didn't fully find what she was looking for until high school, when she joined a choir, and then began writing songs in her teens. "As a teenager, I didn't want to be alive…I just wanted to be dead. I didn't have anything I was good at, because I didn't know I could make music yet," she told Talbot.
Settling into the United States for high school and then college, she dove head first into what music could offer. As Lush proved an incredible first step, another college-era project, 2013's Retired from Sad, New Career in Business, reinforced its predecessor's blend of chamber pop and indie rock flourishes; it was also her first in partnership with producer Patrick Hyland, who has worked on every Mitski album since. Both heady and delivered straight from the heart, poetic yet knifepoint-sharp, the one-two punch of Retired and Lush introduced a well of great potential.
Mitski's third album, 2014's Bury Me At Makeout Creek, served as a tidy turning point as her spotlight warmed up — especially because it was her first release with an independent label, Double Double Whammy. It's as if Mitski realized that people were drawn more to her than to the piano, and began exploring other ways that her intimate songs of pain and love could play out.
Rather than rely on the orchestra to underscore her rich, low-slung vocals, the fuzzier compositions embrace the roiling emotion they convey — ragged edges of distorted guitar and squared synth where once Mitski would have pinned everything together with a string section. What's more, the album's guitar-driven indie rock gave the feeling that she's sonically exploring her newly minted status as a signed indie rock touring act.
Removed from some of the preciousness of her college records, the distortion propelling "Townie" or the electronic percussion on "I Don't Smoke" pushed a rough-hewn color through Mitski's lyrics — underlining the uncertainty, the struggle, the hurt feelings that her storytelling implies. The musical complexities emphasized the lyrical conflict, and the propulsive energy was undeniable.
"The craft here is obvious, as is the accruing confidence of someone who's developed a compelling voice in obscurity," Ian Cohen wrote in a Pitchfork review of Bury Me.
The concept of obscurity is one that would be increasingly important over the following years. While her poetic lyricism is emotionally and visually evocative, Bury Me showed that it never feels diaristic; her internal reality and experiences are lightly obscured, but still essential to the process.
By completely reinventing her sonic palette while simultaneously deepening her lyrical vision, Bury Me hinted at an even brighter future — and set into motion the bind that Mitski has fought against ever since. As her music improved, her fame grew, and she soon found that her success was actually taking away from her ability to explore her musicality.
"When I record, it's this very precious and insular thing," she told Stereogum ahead of releasing 2016's Puberty 2. "With promoting Bury Me, I was so out of touch with music."
In that same interview, Mitski discussed how the songs for Puberty 2 were written without consideration of how they'd be performed live, as if she were attempting to retain some ownership of her experience before giving it over to the growing audiences. (Even so, Mitski toured both Europe and North America that fall.)
Puberty 2 did take a step back from the distorted, brash edge of Bury Me, but doesn't fully return to her orchestral roots either. No genre was safe, no sonic touchstone outside of her palette — everything swirled and caught up in her evocative storytelling, from jumpy electronic touches and burnished horns to surfy guitar. Her vocals ranged from skyscraping pop adventurism to deadpan chop.
The wide-ranging approach worked, as Puberty 2 landed on several "Best Of 2016" album lists and helped Mitski earn opening slots with the Pixies and Lorde in 2017. But as she announced the album's follow-up, 2018's Be the Cowboy, there were hints yet again that Mitski was exhausted by the realities of being a star, not just a creator: "A lot of this record was me not having any feelings, being completely spent but then trying to rally myself and wake up and get back to Mitski," she said in a press release.
Ironically, "not having any feelings" would be the last thing that comes to mind upon hearing Be the Cowboy. The record's scope widened even further than its predecessors; in an almost Bjork-like career trajectory, Mitski continued to find new levels of intensity and beauty without ever repeating herself.
Songs like the explosive and grandiose "Geyser," the disco-tinged "Nobody," and the stomp-clamp wonderland "Washing Machine Heart" showcased the maturation of Mitski's approach, each song creating a world of its own — and the album's universe all spinning beautifully together. While she may have struggled during the creation of Be the Cowboy, something clearly worked: the album became her first to land on the all-genre Billboard 200 albums chart and was her first to be certified Gold in the U.S.
As the attention levels rose like a precipitous tide, Mitski continued to seem wary, if not outright frustrated. "All the sort of aggrandizing, strangely worshipful commentary about me, it doesn't make any sense," she told PBS Newshour.
When touring the record, Mitski opted to work with a choreographer named Jas Lin. The duo developed dance moves inspired by a Japanese form called butoh, resulting in what i-D called "slow, hyper-controlled motions, exaggerated facial expressions, and a fixation on hard emotions and absurdity." In another ironic turn, adding this performative layer between her inner self and her audience resulted in an even more rabid following on social media.
At the end of the tour, Mitski announced an indefinite hiatus from music, leaving social media behind as well — though, meanwhile, her songs were infiltrating thousands and thousands of TikToks. At the time, she told Rolling Stone that she expected to be done for good, to "find another life."
But the music kept calling, and it took less than a year for her return. "What it came down to was, 'I have to do this even though it hurts me, because I love it,'" she told Rolling Stone for a 2021 cover story, six weeks before Laurel Hell arrived in February 2022.
In a press release for that album, Mitski seemed to explain the urge as needing to deal with fame as a side effect of life as a creator: "I don't want to put on a front where I'm a role model, but I'm also not a bad person. I needed to create this space mostly for myself where I sat in that gray area."
For Mitski, that gray area resulted in an '80s synthpop record full of neon blue, splashes erupting from raindrops falling into puddles, and wafts of hazy smoke. Across its 11 tracks, there were love songs with reminders of death and explosively moving songs about feeling stuck — every track a blend of pleasure and pain.
Though various interviews saw her comparing herself to a bathroom stall ready to "take s—" from others, a "black hole" where people dump their feelings, and a "product" to be bought and sold, Mitski seemed to have turned a corner with Laurel Hell. As the album's beatific vibes suggest, she found a sense of acceptance during her hiatus.
"If I truly want the greatest magic in the world, the highest euphoria, the best thing, if I want to do that, I'm going to have to pay an equivalent price," she told Vulture. (She still maintained boundaries, though, declining to answer questions about her personal life.)
Mitski furthers that clarity-achieving experience with The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, an 11-song ode to the one thing that still feels like hers: love. "The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people," Mitski said in a statement.
The first single, "Bug Like an Angel," balances immensities: the ecstatic and the mundane, rock bottom and ecstasy. Mitski embraces the dichotomy sonically as well, with lightly echoed vocals and acoustic guitars interrupted by a sudden choral interjection. "Sometimes a drink feels like family," she sings, the irony of 17 people harmonizing that last word played out in heartbreaking majesty.
The dizzying meteor shower of "Star" and the string-laden "Heaven" reinforce that blend of subtlety and theatrics. At times, The Land is Inhospitable feels like the soundtrack to a tragicomedy epic — a cohesive story of hope, love and hurt colliding.
Mitski has made unique choices in her live performances in support of the record, too — perhaps, in a way, to prevent the burnout and struggle she experienced after releasing albums in the past. A week before the album's release, she put on "Double Features," a limited run of listening parties in which playback of the album was followed by a classic film (like Drugstore Cowboy or Days of Heaven).
In terms of touring, she has opted for intimate, acoustic "Amateur Mistake" performances, with only 10 shows stretched across 39 days. The venues are smaller (New York's 1,500 seat Town Hall subs in for the Laurel Hell tour's 6,000 seat Radio City Music Hall), another sign of Mitski setting another boundary for herself. Judging by a video of her first stop in Mexico City, all of the moves she's made have resulted in something that feels sincere, beautiful and loving.
In a career of unlocking new formulas to convey her stratospheric talent, it seems Mitski may have found one that also supports her heart — a way to square the self that is hers when creating art, and the self that exists in the world for others.
"You have to go to both worlds all the time," she said in a press release. "I don't have a self. I have a million selves, and they're all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me."
With The Land is Inhospitable, those selves populate an expansive, haunting world threaded through with love and care — finally living in harmony with the surrounding darkness.
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