Mitski Miyawaki has, quite famously, struggled with fame. The entitled, incessant demands that can come with being an artist in the public eye led her to taking a hiatus in 2019, when she even considered quitting music altogether. However, she returned with not one but two albums, 2022's Laurel Hell and 2023's The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, and even released a concert film chronicling the 2024 tour that followed. She's continued to surprise us, and it looks like she intends to keep doing so for bit longer, returning with eighth studio album and her answer to "the dog album" phenomena, Nothing's About to Happen to Me. According to press materials, it finds the artist immersing herself in "a rich narrative whose main character is a reclusive woman in an unkempt house" — a deviant in public, but free inside. Similarly, the singer-songwriter has taken a major step back from social media, while remaining in the cultural consciousness as this enigmatic, perhaps even impenetrable, figure. Now, she's less concerned with her visibility as a pop star, and more with taking the deliberate blank spaces of her mythology into her own hands. Recorded with longtime collaborator Patrick Hyland, Nothing's About to Happen closely echoes the soundscapes and thematic through-line of The Land, making a slow first half of the record. The album also features live instrumentation from Mitski's touring band, as well as a whimsical accompaniment from a vocal quartet who give the record a lush lived-in quality; it feels like you've stumbled upon an anonymous set at a dimly lit jazz bar, or a dusty saloon at sunset. Both in sonic breadth and theme, a sense of vastness remains prevalent, including by way of exploring the consequences of both extremes of given situation: like the co-dependency of "Cats" being flipped on its head by "If I Leave," where, amidst distorted guitar, the titular thought experiment falls apart in a fleeting chorus that writhes itself into a viscous knot back to to previous track, a snake swallowing its own tail: "But nobody else could see me / Quite as clearly as you." New boxes she can't fit herself into continue to fill this character's cluttered house, as she experiments with whittling herself down into new shapes; on "I'll Change for You," Mitski promises to bend to her lover's whim atop a lilting bass line. The noisy chatter from the bar leaking into the track like an aperture, you can almost smell the rain-slicked pavement outside and feel the night breeze on your face. The harrowing "Dead Woman," sees Mitski — the artist herself notably breaking through the character study, using third-person verbiage — consider how people will rewrite her story after her death, filling in the blanks where they need to. Whether referring to a lover, a fandom or an industry, it posits that reconstructing her narrative post-mortem is an act of violence that kills her spirit for a second time: "She gave her life / So we could fuck her as we please," she concludes grimly. In many ways, the singer-songwriter's fear of being misconstrued in public perception picks up where she left off with The Land's penultimate track "I'm Your Man." It looms particularly large in Nothing's About to Happen's own second-to-last song, "Charon's Obol," whose title references the act of placing a coin on the deceased's mouth before burial. The vocal quartet bay like dogs, assuming the role of the pack that chased Mitski into the dark — but this time, the hounds embrace her upon her return, and guard her sanctuary in exchange for being fed. After all, sustenance is the very marrow of anything Mitski does;  despite the inevitably of one after the other, the stakes are life or death. Revisiting the latter once again on album closer "Lightning," she wonders, "When I die / Could I come back as the rain?" Unlike "Dead Woman," she see finally see an ending that she can accept as the chorus reaches a fever pitch: "I can hear the song of my death," she exhales, "Singing for the lightning to come." Since returning from her hiatus, Laurel Hell saw the singer-songwriter dress up in flashy synthpop confidence, and the expanses of The Land left her lonelier than ever. By the end of Nothing's About to Happen to Me, it feels as though Mitski has reclaimed both her home and her mythos. No longer lingering on the edges of the album, she steps into her art as presently as she can, trusting that it will continue to speak for her long after she's gone.