“Mitski has joined the war against seasonal depression on the side of seasonal depression” reads a now-viral post as singer-songwriter Mitski teased her latest album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me (watch her preview the record to a room full of cats here).

For many of us, the singer’s decade-spanning discography has provided the soundtrack for breakups, grief, existential dread, and nearly every other overwhelming catastrophe of modern life. Her music is a fixture on any self-respecting depression playlist, and her latest project is no exception. Here, she steps into the role of a reclusive woman inside an unkempt home, where, cast as a deviant by the world outside, she finds freedom within.

Threaded with alt-rock and country-infused acoustics, the album returns to familiar Mitski themes of loss, transformation and the discomfort of being perceived by others: in the upbeat “Rules”, she’ll “get a new haircut…be somebody else”, and “be dressed like your best idea”; on opener “In a Lake”, she sings of moving to the city from a small town, not driven by ambition but instead seeking complete anonymity, and in “Dead Woman”, she hypothesises the aftermath of protagonists’ death in a melodic swelling track with lyrics like “stab me 27 times” – typical Mitski.

While ranking her portfolio by emotional devastation may seem impossible, we tried anyway, pulling a track from (almost) each of her existing seven projects while allowing this eighth one to sit with us a little longer. Here are seven of the most devastating Mitski tracks ranked - stay sad, everyone.

7. “I WILL” 

I saw Mitski for the first time in 2022 at the Roundhouse with my partner. I had purchased the tickets for their birthday, but I wasn’t personally the biggest Mitski fan at the time. I found that I couldn’t really get into her music, but I went in with an open heart and an unravelling mind (I was PMSing, which led me to fight with my partner and cry in the queue).

When Mitski arrived on stage, she was bathed in purple lighting as she danced – song after song, I tried my best to hold back tears, until she played “I Will”. I hate to be all main character about it, but in my fragile state it felt like she was singing directly to me: “Hold my hand / There’s no need to be brave.” As she comes to the end of the song she repeats resolutely: “I’ll be brave / I’ll be brave / I’ll be brave” – I repeated the phrase to myself as I cried all the way home. (HJ)

6. “BAG OF BONES” 

I haven’t been sad – at least not Mitski-level sad – for a while. But revisiting her debut album Lush while searching for her most devastating track feels like pressing on a bruise just to check if it still hurts. With that, “Bag of Bones” takes sixth place.

Often interpreted as being about a hollow relationship rooted primarily in physical gratification, the track is defeated, complete with cutting lyrics like “I know my room is a mess, over and over again I tell myself I'll clean tomorrow/ Just move the stuff up off the bed, And do what you came here to do”. I’m certain this track has a kill count. (T)

5. “TWO SLOW DANCERS” 

Writers, artists and philosophers have been grappling with the passage of time from the earliest days of human civilisation. But you might have noticed that Plato, Saint Augustine, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf have all been a lot less cocky since Mitski dropped “Two Slow Dancers” – perhaps the definitive artistic statement on how time takes a sledgehammer to us all.

Evocative from the first line (“does it smell like a school gymnasium in here?”), the song starts out quiet and builds to a majestic crescendo, as strings thrum and Mitski repeats the line: “to think that we could stay the same…to think that we could stay the same…” What fools we were!! I think it’s one of the saddest songs about heartbreak every written (after my last relationship ended, I had to ban myself from listening to it – it’s simply too powerful), but more than just a breakup song, it’s also about nostalgia, getting older and the impossibility of recapturing the past, with the line “the ground has been slowly pulling us back down” introducing a note of impeding mortality. Beautiful and elegiac, “Two Slow Dancers” captures the truth that every moment of happiness contains within it the spectre of its own vanishing. You can’t go back. (JG)

4. “I GUESS” 

The last few songs on most Mitski albums tend to be my favourite, and the last few songs on Laurel Hell are no exception. The meaning of “I Guess” has shifted and continues to shift for me as I get older. I listen to it and think about my friends who have recently left London: “Without you, I don’t yet know quite how to live”. I listen to it and think of my mum: “It’s been you and me since before I was me.” Or my friend who passed: “If I could keep anything of you / I would keep just this quiet after you”. Every time I hear the song, and the piano starts to play, it shapeshifts into something completely new – Mitski’s music always knows how to affect me deeply in my core. (HJ)

3. “I BET ON LOSING DOGS” 

If “Two Slow Dancers” is about longing for something beautiful which is lost forever, “I Bet On Losing Dogs” is hopeless in a different sort of way: it’s about the mistakes you know you’re making, and how self-awareness isn’t always enough to save you. The song’s narrator isn’t deluding herself – she’s well aware that the relationship she’s throwing herself into is doomed (“I know they’re losing and I’ll pay for my place by the ring”), but that’s kind of the point. The lyrics suggest that, as is often the case, her drive towards self-destruction is more important than the object of her desire: she just wants to feel something. Nodding to the French term for orgasm as ‘la petite mort’ (the little death), sex is portrayed in the end as a form of annihilation, a brief respite from the terrible obligation of living.

There’s something incongruously gentle about the music: the synth line adds a note of unease, but it’s mostly mid-tempo indie rock with an insistent bass line and sighing backing vocals, with Mitski’s voice sounding not desperate but resigned, like someone who has accepted their fate. “I Bet On Losing Dogs” is a bleak, haunting depiction of love as a form of self-harm, and the patterns of behaviour which people find themselves trapped by, even or especially when they embrace them. (JG)

2. “CLASS OF 2013” 

For anyone who knows the throes of post-graduation terror, this one is for you. “Class of 2013” is a devastating reckoning with the fear that follows the transition into the adult world. On the track, Mitski pleads for maternal comfort to soothe the anxieties that follow.

Lyrics like “And I'll leave what I'm chasing/ For the other girls to pursue” also speak to a surrendering to the pressures that apply in life to “make it”. If you’re on the cusp of graduation, then it’s OK to skip this one: sometimes real Mitski fans don’t have it in them to listen to Mitski. (T)

1. “LAST WORDS OF A SHOOTING STAR” 

Here we have it, the most devastating Mitski track of all time. There is a mastery to bringing truly dark moments to life without laying them out in overly direct, corny and cliché language. Mitski not only has that mastery, but she has continuously pushed it to uncomfortably reflective places. “Last Words of a Shooting Star”, from Bury Me At Makeout Creek, is an example of the singer at her best. In the lyrics, “they’ll think of me kindly when they come for my things / they’ll never know how I stirred up the dark in that room with no thoughts like a blood-sniffing shark”, she uses the image of a tidy room to question how we attempt to skew external perceptions of our struggling – and how, even in death, we care enough to want to appear put together.

I’ve read many debates online about whether the song is referencing a literal plane crash or if the image of turbulence is used to describe suicide. Either way, across less than three minutes, she manages to perfectly channel a fascination I’ve always had around what happens when someone passes away unexpectedly. Where do their intricately built inner worlds disappear to? Is it better to leave it all behind for someone to find, or is grief easier with a more digestible and palpable narrative around how someone really experienced the world? 

I could unpack every single lyric from this song, but I don’t think my (already surpassed) word count limit would suffice. Instead, I’ll leave you with the haunting magic of Mitski, in these final lines: “I always wanted to die clean and pretty, but I’d be too busy on working days. So I am relieved the turbulence wasn’t forecasted, I couldn’t have changed anyways / I am relieved that I left my room tidy, goodbye”.(HD)

Nothing's About to Happen to Me is out now