Mitski — “the most alluring and enigmatic musician in indie rock” (Rolling Stone) — announces her new album, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We“, out September 15th on Dead Oceans, and presents its anthemic lead single, “Bug Like an Angel.” In this album, which is Mitski’s most sonically expansive, epic, and wise album to-date, 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. 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.
Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles, and incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people — 12 in Los Angeles and 5 in Nashville arranged by Mitski. For the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young.
Lead single “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love.
“The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” reads as a dramatic title, but stress the second to last word and you hear the beginning of a question. The songs on Mitski’s seventh album sound like that, too: bold yet tentative, elegant yet knotty, drawing you in with their organic beauty until you realize you’re stranded in the dark alongside her, wondering what awaits us.
The follow-up to 2022’s “Laurel Hell” is both her warmest and most challenging effort to date – not even handing out the questions to you, let alone any answers, but moving with multitudes – and so the first to vividly capture the ostensible contradictions and chilling intricacies that have long been a mark of her song writing. Though the songs don’t quite explode or follow conventional paths the way some of her older material did, this is the least detached Mitski has sounded. Even the most dissociative songs sound alive, making the loneliest thing burn brightly and beautifully.
For hardcore Mitski fans, each of the singular artist’s releases are akin to a prophetic message. But there’s something about ‘The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We’ – her seventh album – that felt particularly ecclesiastical. Be it the orchestral swell of ‘Heaven’, the ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ essence of ‘I Don’t Like My Mind’, or the choral backing vocals peppered throughout, it’s as if she crafted the record with a spellbound congregation in mind. Which, given the record’s rapturous reception, isn’t too far from the truth. Utterly enveloping and borderline transportive, it’s a hauntingly beautiful handling of hope amidst sorrow.
The Fat Angel Sings 