Evoking Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, this intimate, enigmatic and intoxicating album is an understated masterpiece
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The lead single of Mitski’s previous album, 2022’s Laurel Hell, took a bleak view of her future in music. “I used to think I’d be done by 20,” she sang on Working for the Knife. “Now at 29, the road ahead appears the same / Though maybe at 30, I’ll see a way to change.” It was the Japanese American songwriter’s latest treatise on her conflicted relationship to her niche but intense fame. After several of her songs unexpectedly went viral, Mitski saw her mordant, nuanced introspection reduced to “sad girl” pop and came to feel dehumanised by the extreme elements of her fandom. Nevertheless, Laurel Hell riskily embodied her uneasy proximity to the mainstream by dabbling in sharp-edged synth-pop that came off like a dare between herself and her audience about who would vault her there first. It was the last release on her record contract, and at the end of the tour it seemed as though Mitski would retreat from public life for good.
At 32, however, it seemed Mitski saw a way to change. This summer, she announced that she had not only renegotiated her deal, but her relationship with her audience: “Ultimately, I recognised that I really want to keep making music, and I’m willing to take the difficult stuff with the wonderful stuff – like any job, or relationship, or worthwhile thing in life,” she wrote. The admission heralded a surprise new album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, that was completely unlike anything Mitski had made before. After Laurel Hell’s prickly two-step with the big leagues – and the distorted guitar pop that made her name – The Land … was as intimate and penetrating as a dark night, filtering the shadowy hum of an album like Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out through the country classicism of her adopted home in Nashville. It was Mitski’s own quiet crossroad blues, turning her tender negotiations between the cold certainty of isolation and the warm risk of connection into spooked, hymnal allegories populated by angels, kings and gods; bugs, dogs and birds, all spotlit beneath a benevolent moon.
