“This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star.
The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.
Released: September 2023
Cat: DOC350
Label: Dead Oceans
Listen
Tracklist
SIDE A:
01 Bug Like an Angel
02 Buffalo Replaced
03 Heaven
04 I Don’t Like My Mind
05 The Deal
SIDE B:
06 When Memories Snow
07 My Love Mine All Mine
08 The Frost
09 Star
10 I’m Your Man
11 I Love Me After You