PROJECT 02 by Ivy Rose Consulting

Jess Fine pledges authenticity

Nongkrong Festival 2025

Rosie Turner on Life Drawing & Identity

Capturing the Creative Dream

YARNS ABOUT BLAK JOY

I got no money, you got no money, we got a good time

Pilgrim to the Creek

Ard

MULTIFUTURES

Blueberry - Anna Mensing

Do you see me? - Max Chahine

Abella D'Adamo

Auxe Exhibition - Emerging Artists Collective

Olia Kravchyshyna

Faery Hexes

Joseph Botica

Hannah Einhorn

Lu Deverall

Madonna Whore Complex

Zoe Milah DeJesus

Brooke Hoffert

Imogen Kerr

Ella Lee

Paige Quinn

Kim Leutwyler

From My Room - Ruby Allegra

Visaya Hoffie

Indie darling Mitski Miyawaki, known mononymously as Mitski, has always calculated the precise distance between herself and her listener. In 2019, Mitski deleted her Twitter account, later announcing her “last show indefinitely.” Despite returning two years later with the announcement of Laurel Hell, her tweets were suddenly being written in third person. Live performances, once notoriously candid, were reconsidered into a choreographed routine standardised across all shows. Mitski knows the cost of an audience that gets too close and continues to remind us that she’s the one holding the ruler, content to increase this distance whenever her audience misbehaves.

Following the terrestrial grace of The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We, Mitski returns with her eighth studio album, Nothing's About to Happen to Me. Recorded live by Mitski’s touring band and engineered at home by long-time collaborator Patrick Hyland, Nothing's About to Happen to Me introduces a new character, described as “a reclusive woman in an unkempt house.” Outside, she is a deviant; inside, Mitski tells us, she is free. The lyrics are situated almost entirely within a single, hushed and weathered location: a house, the woman who occupies it, and the specific texture of a life turned resolutely inward.

The album opens with "In A Lake," an overture in the truest sense: unhurried and barometric, idling in the calm before the storm. “In A Lake” has an acoustic balladry reminiscent of “Texas Reznikoff,” another opening track from Mitski’s third album, Bury Me At Makeout Creek, building to a similarly cathartic release. Our character laments that every place she has ever known has become a reminder of what she’s lost, where “everywhere you go makes your heart ache.” She has drawn her own map of the town—not of where things are, but of where she can no longer go. And yet, she reorients her perspective: “But in a lake, you can backstroke forever / The sky before you, the dark right behind.” This chorus introduces one of the album’s most painful through-lines: a woman who knows exactly how dark it is and chooses, with gauzy logic, to simply keep her eyes trained on the sky

Where Is My Phone?, the lead single from the album, reacquaints us with Mitski’s indie rock beginnings—and God damn, Rockski is back, baby. Driven by an insistent, chugging guitar and a propulsive rhythm section, the song is loud and immediate, building to a fuzzed-out and distorted guitar solo that catapults you into the central character’s frame of mind. Its accompanying music video, inspired by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, sharpens the song’s psychological portrait: a woman prowling a gothic interior, composure unravelling as the outside world closes in on the walls she has carefully erected. Like Merricat, she has made something sovereign out of solitude and discovers that to be sovereign is not to escape torment, but to be claimed by a different kind.

“Cats” is a bittersweet, scaled-back ballad, pedal steel sighing through the arrangement. Mitski’s ability to quietly devastate you stays unmatched. This is Mitski at her most comfortable, composed with the same components as “Heaven,” “The Frost” and the critically and commercially acclaimed “My Love Is Mine All Mine.” Our character laments on the precarity of love, a common theme throughout Mitski’s discography, seeking comfort in the presence of her and her partner’s cats (“In the meantime / rescues at my side / our two cats both asleep by me tonight”). She relents, with emotional clarity, that the things she loves most are not hers to keep, that sometimes loving means letting go (“maybe tomorrow night / the cats will be nowhere in sight / but I’ll be glad to know / they’re out following their hearts tonight”).

“If I Leave” begins with a repetitive, punctuating bassline before building to an anthemic high that evokes the likes of “Your Best American Girl” from Puberty 2. Our character voices one of the album’s central tensions: whether the desire to disappear eclipses the fear of being forgotten. The guitars crest and collapse and the question remains: without someone to see you, do you still exist? Where “If I Leave”sits with the fear of being left behind, “I’ll Change For You” capitulates to it entirely (“I’ll do anything / For you to love me again / If you don’t love me now / I will change for you”). The willingness to become someone else, to sand down whatever it is about herself that has made her unlovable, to do anything to keep the person who sees her from looking away, offers the cold comfort of someone who has confused surrender with resolution.

In “Dead Women,” our character imagines her own death and watches as her friends and former lovers re-write her story into something more convenient. It is an old and specifically female nightmare and one that parodies Mitski’s own experience being consumed by a public that has confused proximity for knowledge, and knowledge for permission. With “Dead Women” ending on frenetic arpeggios, the dreamy, pedal steel-heavy “Instead of Here” introduces another vignette into our character’s boundaries being violated. Where the sky in “In The Lake” provided an escape, now not even the sky offers solace (“I looked up at the night sky / Wondering, “Is this what it’s worth? / The stars never answered back”). Instead, she flees inward, “where nobody can reach.” A distinction is drawn between the woman who withdraws on her own terms and the woman who disappears when there is nowhere else left to go.

Sonically disorienting but nevertheless compelling, “Rules” arrives like a non-sequitur. Led by an exuberant brass ensemble, the overall effect is less celebratory than fanatical—the sound of someone who has passed through sadness and paranoia and is now losing their grip on reality entirely. Where earlier tracks held glimpses of lucidity, “Rules” is delusion made flesh: a woman twirling deliriously in her living room, completely and contently unmoored from the wreckage around her.

In “That White Cat” our character angrily vents about the white neighbourhood cat who has taken ownership over her home. Still, she keeps going to work, “To pay for that cat’s house [...] For the family of possums / For the bugs who drink my blood / And the birds who eat those bugs / So that white cat can kill those birds.” Everything has its place in this microcosmic food chain, organised entirely around our character, without her consent, and within which she’s resigned to her place. “That White Cat” exposes the barely-contained energy of someone fixating on the minutiae of their surroundings because the alternative is to look directly at the larger thing that is coming apart. Animals continue circling in “Charon’s Obol,” and our character keeps tending to them, only this time out of obligation to the women who have died in the house before her. “Charon’s Obol” completes an understated diptych about the cost of staying: two songs about what it means to inherit a place—its debts, its dead, its critters—and go on tending to it anyway.

“Lightning” closes the album like a stiff window opening to a cool breeze—reverb-drenched and dreamlike, its suspended bassline carrying the unmistakable atmosphere of Angelo Badalamenti while Mitski croons like Julee Cruise overhead. A distorted guitar solo briefly interrupts this calm, underpinning our character’s signature blind optimism: “If I’m dark, all the better / To reflect the moonlight / If I mourn, all the better / To behold the sunrise.” Whether all this hope has substance, or is simply another rotation in her spiral, is a question that Mitski lets dangle in the dawning air.

The irony at the heart of Nothing's About to Happen to Me is that its author, who has spent years calibrating the precise distance between herself and her audience, has made her most theatrical record yet: a one-woman show in which the woman knows she is being watched, has always known, and has chosen, with the quiet resignation of someone who has already made her peace with it, to perform her undoing anyway.

Demure acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout so called “Australia” and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our complete respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

© Demure Mag

Demure encourages the discovery and appreciation of emerging femme, queer and GNC creatives. Our purpose is to subvert the definition of the word demure through experimental and engaging explorations.

We are completely self-funded and volunteer-based. Our team works at much less inspiring places to keep this project going, so all donations are appreciated.

DONATE