All my own, how I love me after you
Sad university students will be happy to hear that there’s a new Mitski album on the scene. Given Laurel Hell’s recent release last year, fans were left shocked when a release announcement on July 23, 2023, was hand-delivered by the artist herself.
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is complicated. It’s restless. It’s resolute. A tangled mess that begs you to be patient with it. It’s in disarray until the final moments of clarity in its track listing. Mitski brandishes a resolute abandonment of Sad Girl SummerTM and fairly – now it’s time to grow up.
Amidst a flurry of ideas, an immediate standout is a new sense of self-reflective sadness. Tracks like “Bug Like an Angel” and “I Don’t Like My Mind” provide pictures of a narrator who has come face to face with over-indulgence, to the point of sickness, all at their own hand.
“The Deal” and “When Memories Snow” step further, with her pleading to sell her soul and shovel away any memories to keep herself buried away in work. Many colorations of the same reflective despair paint the album’s canvas.
The land is inhospitable but it’s also baren. Tracks feel intimate, like you’re pressing your ear against someone’s innermost thoughts. Gone is the pop-rock sheen of the Mitski of yore, warm choir arrangements and lonesome guitars swaddle you in their place. Until, of course, the drums arrive like a powerful sobering force snapping you awake.
Another theme bubbles to the surface, stuck in the album’s throat. Love that’s old and ridden with guilt Mitski takes and beautifully dresses up, calling it “Heaven”.
It’s not the first track to harken back to themes of nature, like “Buffalo Replaced”, but it’s the first to transform Mitski herself into a piece of it. Transforming into a weeping willow, she’s bent with euphoria that echoes across the room, and loss manifested in kisses left behind in old coffee cups. Love in this album is in turn left neglected and, like in “I’m Your Man”, it grows cold out of self-destruction.
Love turns another way in this album too. A direction that runs through Side B like a thumping, waking pulse.
It’s irrefutable that “My Love Mine All Mine” has become a sensation. This track is fully dedicated to pleading to the moon to hold all your love for even an extra moment beyond death so that others may still feel it. More importantly, Mitski presents the listener with the most important idea of the album: your love is your love.
It takes work to get there, “My Love Mine All Mine” is a glimmer of hope before a trilogy of desperate scratches at the past with “The Frost”, “Star”, and “I’m Your Man”, clinging to flickering light from a burnt-out star of love before surrendering to judgment and acceptance of a love that can never be again.
Finally, it’s you.
“I Love Me After You” is triumphant. It’s naked. It’s grossly inhospitable following the tracks before; marked with failed loves, self-deprecation, indulgence, and so are we, who now must choose to come away from everything with the chance to continue to love, to do something with the land you cultivated now.
It’s you. Finally.
