After teasing a farewell from music with last year’s Laurel Hell, Mitski returns with her seventh studio album The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We. Across 11 tender tracks, she reflects on the beauty and mundanity of life, positioning the complexity of the human condition against the vastness of the Great American Expanse, which becomes a metaphor to explore the loneliness buried deep within. Whether it’s finding comfort in the bottom of a glass on confessional opener “Bug Like an Angel” (“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/ Sometimes a drink feels like family”) or contemplating personal failures on “I’m Your Man” against strumming guitar chords, chirruping cicadas and the sound of howling dogs (“You believe me like a God/ I destroy you like I am”), solitude stretches through the record like a neverending expanse.
Whereas Laurel Hell used synth-pop to reflect on Mitski’s frustrations with capitalism and feminine beauty standards, The Land Is Inhospitable takes a more measured approach, with sweeping orchestral scores and country-tinged guitars that reach into the innermost core of human emotion. “I don’t like my mind/ I don’t like being left alone in a room/ with all its opinions about the things that I’ve done,” she confesses on “I Don’t Like My Mind”, while “The Deal” takes the old blues myth about musicians selling their soul to the devil as a metaphor for existential angst. “Will somebody take this soul?” she asks over a sad fiddle, before reaching the bleak conclusion: “Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” It’s the unbearable lightness of being that anchors Mitski’s reflections, the mundane heartbreaks and joys that rarely get spoken, but from which beauty emerges.
Elsewhere, Cleo Sol shares a new album, Fontaines D.C release a new version of their third studio album, Skinty Fia, and Nas unveils his latest collaboration with Hit-Boy on Magic 3.
