The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.
After contemplating retirement, Mitski returns with a new album that’s warmer, quieter, and more organic-sounding. For the first time in a while, she sounds like she has space to breathe.
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We borrow the instrumental approach of American film soundtracks and country music. With songs so rooted in the sunlit canyons and arid plains, this is indeed Mitski's “most American” output
The US artist's second post-hiatus record does away with the glossy sheen and favours hushed intimacy. Read the NME review
If she tried playing those songs to Harry Styles’s stadium screamers she’d lose them instantly, but on headphones, ideally in the dark, she can mesmerise
Mitski's seventh record is a brutally honest chronicle of the struggle to find self-love.
Your daily dose of the best music, film and comedy news, reviews, streams, concert listings, interviews and other exclusives on Exclaim!
‘The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We’ is Mitski at her most emotionally raw. The artist’s seventh record starts with the mellow ‘Bug Like an Angel’ –
The Japanese-American singer-songwriter sounds deceptively sweet on this lush, contemplative album largely recorded in Nashville
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We by Mitski album review: the work of an artist who sounds creatively rejuvenated
The singer’s ability to pack so many gut-punches and inspired ideas into half an hour remains uncannily impactful.
Mitski's 'The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We' marks a shift away from her earlier work toward a more mainstream sound that might even be called Americana.
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We album review by Zara Hedderman for Northern Transmissions, the LP drops September 15 via Dead Oceans
Playing country-inflected orchestral pop with sardonic wit and deep feeling, Mitski underlines why she’s one of the very best singer-songwriters working today
Mitski - The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We review: out with midski, let's get litski
The uncompromising 72-year-old Pretenders rocker will surely propel the band to the top of the charts for the first time in 30 years