Sometimes, Mitski feels life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” she says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have after I die, so I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will shine love long after she’s gone. That’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land.

“This is my most American album,” she says. The music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. Sonically Mitski’s most epic and wise album, the songs introduce wounds and then actively heal them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like light from a distant star.

It's full of the ache of the grown-up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. 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 in pain, arching towards love. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning and then rejecting us. To love this place, this earth, this America, this body takes work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

Analog mountains mixing with minotaurs and wolfs, walking towards an marble castle.
"One day Prometheus was trying to solve a quarrel that was raging between the gods and the men. At a festival the men were going to sacrifice a bull for the first time. They asked him which parts of the bull should be offered to the gods and which should be eaten by men. Prometheus decided to play a trick on Zeus. He killed the bull, skinned it and butchered it. He split it into two portions, in one he put the best, lean meat. In the second he put bones followed by a thick layer of fat. Prometheus offered both to Zeus to take his choice. Zeus looked at both portions, one looked good but was rather on the small side, the other was much larger and covered in a layer of fat which Zeus felt must cover the best, tastiest portion of meat. He chose that one. When Zeus realised that he had been tricked he was furious. He took fire away from man so that they could never cook their meat or feel warm again."

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