To Know Mitski Is to Never Truly Know Mitski at All

In October 2015, I was waiting in the bathroom line at the now-defunct Brooklyn DIY venue Shea Stadium. I had an extra ticket to the show that night, so I brought along my friend, who’d never heard of the artist headlining. We had a few minutes before the set and figured we’d pee while there was time. While we were leaning against the wall waiting for the bathroom door to open, someone stepped in front of us. “Why did that girl just cut everyone?” my friend asked. The girl was Mitski, and she’d politely asked to use the bathroom before going onstage.

In the years since that show, I’ve seen Mitski in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Woodstock, and Paris. I’ve seen her playing the bass and the guitar, both backed by a band and solo. I’ve seen her cover Calvin Harris and Personal Best. I’ve seen her wearing a tan, calf-length skirt; black biker shorts; jeans and a T-shirt a fan gave to her the night before. I’ve seen her when she has acne; I’ve seen her when her skin is clear. I’ve seen her with long hair and with a bob. More than once, I’ve seen her cry.

Save some fleeting glance at the sea of faces in the crowd, Mitski has never seen me. She doesn’t know my name or anything about me. She doesn’t remember any of my outfits. As is the case with most people and their favorite musicians, our relationship is parasocial, a one-sided relationship between a person (me) and a persona (my perception of Mitski). My experience isn’t unique, and neither is hers; the adoration of strangers is a fact of celebrity. But unlike many of her counterparts, who respond to their audience’s hunger for connection by simulating familiarity (think Taylor Swift holding listening parties at her apartment or publishing pages of her diary), Mitski has reacted to her fans’ increasing desire for access to her by making art about how performative and empty that supposed relationship is.

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Her seventh studio album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, is out Friday and comes after a touring hiatus that lasted from 2019 to 2022 and after her music’s explosion on TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows a tour spent playing bigger venues to more rabid crowds. It’s also the first album she’s released after negotiating her contract, after hinting that 2022’s Laurel Hell would perhaps be her last. In The Land Is Inhospitable, Mitski returns to the experimental, layered sound that characterized her first two albums, recorded in college and released on Bandcamp. But instead of simply turning back the clock on fame, she grapples with her simultaneous discomfort with and need for celebrity. She’s telling her fans to take a step back by, paradoxically, continuing to make music they love. Are they getting the message?

As one of those fans, I’ve asked myself that question. Around 2018, when I noticed her closing off, I felt a mixture of melancholy and fascination—again, a common experience, one encountered by any fan whose personal favorite hits it big. But I was also intrigued by her unorthodox approach to fame; rather than quitting music entirely or honing a public persona that could simulate familiarity with her audience, she seemed to double down on making music and performing in a way that underlined just how little a fan can know an artist.

Mitski has often bristled at the idea that her songs are pure diary entries, written in a flood of emotion. “It makes me into a vessel for creation instead of the creator,” she’s said, emphasizing the work and expertise required to craft her music. Even the brevity of her songs (the longest in her catalog is “Crack Baby,” at four minutes and 52 seconds) is intentional; she’s aware that she’s not entitled to people’s attention but has to win it, and does so with strategy and intention.

Asserting that your music is craft rather than feeling doesn’t always land with an audience whose affective relationship to their favorite artist has to do with more than the music. Mitski fans call her Mom and God and queen; they don’t call her maestro. As her fame has increased, she’s entered a long struggle to define herself as the person creating the music, not the product itself.

You can tell Mitski didn’t plan to be famous because of the screaming. “Drunk Walk Home,” a tortured banger off her 2014 album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, begins with the singer’s plan to “retire to the Salton Sea / at the age of 23” and ends with bloodcurdling screams. For years, Mitski would actually scream when she played the song live, which she did at almost every show. In the most compelling evidence of this available online, even Mitski’s then-drummer Casey Weissbuch looks almost amazed at her howls as she walks offstage.

For a person who intends to make their living as a singer, regular screaming is reckless and shortsighted, like playing football without a helmet. The screams would have made more sense if she did really intend to retire at 23; instead, Mitski released the song a month and a half after her 24th birthday and kept screaming when she performed it for years after.

Then, at a certain point, she stopped. Sometime in between the release of her fourth and fifth albums, the screams disappeared from her live performances. This may have been in part because she was no longer playing the kind of tiny, DIY venues that she could fill up with her voice alone; she was moving out of the small, grungy rooms of New York’s punk scene, where she barely needed a mic and the people in the front row could reach out and touch her. But it also read as an acknowledgment of touring as a long-term job, an activity for which she would need to maintain her body for many years to come. During the 2022 tour for her most recent album, Laurel Hell, Mitski debuted some new “Drunk Walk Home” choreography. These days, she kneels down on the ground and mimes a scream into the stage, before using her hands to mock-bury the sound.

In “Working for the Knife,” the lead single for Laurel Hell, she sings, “I used to think I’d be done by 20 / Now at 29, the road ahead appears the same.” Mitski replaced what looked like an outburst of passion with a careful, rehearsed simulacrum, a shift that suggests her recognition of a career that stretches far into the future. Her new performance practice doesn’t just send a practical message, though—it’s also a claim about what part of the song is important. In playacting a scream rather than really doing one, Mitski becomes the craftsman rather than the art. She’s creating the illusion of pain, not exhibiting her actual pain for her audience.

Mitski’s choreography has served as a way for her to make this point over and over again, drawing a bright line between herself and her music. In 2018, she embarked on a yearlong tour to promote her fifth album, Be the Cowboy. Although 2016’s Puberty 2 had been met with critical acclaim, winding up on a handful of best-of-the-year lists, Be the Cowboy was Mitski’s first album to crack the Billboard 200. Ahead of the tour, she worked with choreographer Monica Mirabile to craft a precise, unnerving dance routine based on the postwar Japanese dance theater style butoh. She wore simple outfits—black bottoms and white tops paired with kneepads—and moved around the stage making small, repetitive movements and unsettling facial expressions, using a table and chair as props. The choreography managed to be both understated and clearly effortful, incorporating poses ripped from Pilates class that she somehow struck while singing. She met the challenge of a tour with bigger crowds in larger venues not by trying to create the illusion of connection with her audiences; instead, she held them at arm’s length, creating a standardized, alienating spectacle that didn’t pretend she was their friend.

But this choreography didn’t seem to do enough to insulate Mitski from her fans. In June 2019, she announced that a September performance at Central Park’s SummerStage would be her “last show indefinitely.” Fans took this to mean she was quitting music, a notion she rebuffed on Twitter, writing, “I’ve been on nonstop tour for over five years, I haven’t had a place to live during this time, and I sense that if I don’t step away soon, my self-worth/identity will start depending too much on staying in the game.”

Despite coming four years removed from that announcement, The Land Is Inhospitable still seems concerned with the grinding expectations that come with fame. In the cacophonous, swinging “When Memories Snow,” Mitski asks, “And if I break / Could I go on break? / Be back in my room / Writing speeches in my head / Listening to the thousand hands / That clap for me in the dark.” The fame she once longed for has become a job, something she wants to clock out from so that she can go back to imagining it as it might be, not as it is. It’s fitting that she’s singing about going back in time to before she was the TikTok-famous, Billboard-charting, mononymous Mitski she is now; her new record has more in common with her first two albums, Lush and Retired From Sad, New Career in Business—Bandcamp releases from her college days at SUNY Purchase—than with the more commercially successful work that has characterized her career in the interim.

The Land Is Inhospitable didn’t always seem like a certainty: Before she released Laurel Hell in 2022, she told Rolling Stone that she planned to leave the music industry entirely, only to realize she owed her label, Dead Oceans, another album. After completing that requirement, any future records didn’t seem guaranteed. (Ahead of The Land Is Inhospitable, she renegotiated her deal with Dead Oceans.)

But anyone who’s listened to Mitski’s songs closely is likely unsurprised to find her back again with another album. The tortured, passionate affair she has with her own work is a common thread throughout her music, which is studded with love songs to a “you” that she’s said is music, rather than another person. In a conversation with Bob Boilen about her song “Geyser,” off her 2018 album, Be the Cowboy, she explained, “I wrote it about music. … As a musician, you have to keep sacrificing other things in your life, sacrificing relationships, sacrificing other opportunities, maybe even your physical or mental health, in order to do it, because it’s not an easy thing to do and it’s not a job that people need you to do, like being a doctor or plumber, and you really have to give up a lot of things to do it, I think. And so I wrote it over a long period of time thinking about all the things I give up for it, but I gladly give it up because I love it so much and I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

There is one thing in particular, though, that Mitski has seemed to struggle to give up as she’s met with increasing success in the music business: her privacy. It’s one thing to sit in your room imagining the crowds that will cheer for you and another thing entirely to confront those crowds, to try to walk through them. Over the course of her career, Mitski has slowly shut the door to her personal life. First she phased out social media. She told Brooklyn Magazine in 2016 that she had to get off Tumblr, explaining, “I started getting messages where teenagers would threaten to hurt themselves if I didn’t respond, and I realized that I didn’t want to be that accessible. … Sometimes [fans] think, Me and this artist are meant to be together. We’re the same person. And you have to know when to disengage.” In 2019, she deleted her Twitter account, where, for many years, she’d posted her thoughts on everything from self-care to music bros to her own career (she would later revive the account, but as a professional venue dedicated to posts about tours, merch, and promotion). Shortly after, she played her last show before an indefinite hiatus, a prospect her fans met with such panic it became instantly apparent why she might have felt the need to go on an indefinite hiatus. Even when she returned to performance, she kept her personal life to herself; in a 2022 Vulture profile marking the release of Laurel Hell, she demurred when E. Alex Jung asked the names of her cats, fearing that somehow that tidbit of personal info would allow fans to locate her.

It wasn’t just her personal life that she protected from her fans, though. Over the course of her career, Mitski has adapted her performance persona in a way that underlines, rather than obscures, how little her audience truly knows about her, using choreography to make her shows into deliciously alienating spectacles that both parody and mimic the platonic ideal of pop stardom. She’s telling her fans over and over, through her artwork itself, that they’ll never really know her.

In her book Everything I Need I Get From You, an exploration of fangirls and the internet, writer Kaitlyn Tiffany devotes an entire chapter to screaming, which she identifies as one of the enduring features of the fangirl, a timeless way to express an excess of passion. Mitski has certainly evoked screams from her fans, many of whom fall into the demographic (young, female) that has been associated since Beatlemania with high-decibel adoration.

Early in her career, Mitski’s power seemed to come not from her ability to whip up a frenzy but instead from the way she silenced her audience. She’d often decline to play an encore, telling the crowd plainly that she preferred to just finish the show where she finished it rather than engaging in the pageantry of leaving and coming back. And when she played “Last Words of a Shooting Star,” the final track from Bury Me, the crowd would inevitably hush for the acoustic, solo performance. She set boundaries with her stage banter; a video of a 2016 show in L.A. contains a moment when a fan yells, “I love you!” and Mitski replies, kindly but firmly, “You don’t know me. But thank you, I get that you really love my music, thank you very much.”

But as that audience grew bigger, her attempts to corral them seemed less successful. In 2022, she tweeted a lengthy thread requesting that fans not record video at length during her shows. “Sometimes when I see people filming entire songs or whole sets, it makes me feel as though we are not here together,” she wrote. “When I’m on stage and look to you but you are gazing into a screen, it makes me feel as though those of us on stage are being taken from and consumed as content.”

What had obviously seemed to Mitski and her team like a relatively reasonable request soon transformed into an online furor. People replied to her tweet arguing that dissociation, ADHD, and depression meant they couldn’t be present at her shows, and needed to take videos to process the experience later. Eventually, the tweets disappeared.

In part because of her music’s sudden popularity on TikTok, as Mitski’s fame has grown, so has the generational gap between herself and her audience. Songs like “Nobody,” “Washing Machine Heart,” and erstwhile deep cut “Strawberry Blond” off her second album have soundtracked thousands of TikToks, boiling down angst, loneliness, and unrequited love into a few quick seconds. When I saw her play in Milwaukee during her Laurel Hell tour in March 2022, I felt like a comparative crone at 26, surrounded by Zoomers in bedazzled cowboy hats.

Mitski is a millennial and earlier in her career used the internet like one, tweeting quips and blogging on Tumblr. But her fans’ engagement with the boundaries between the digital and the physical suggest a demographic shift; if you first heard a song when you used it in your own TikTok, maybe you felt a kind of ownership over not just the music but the position of performing it. In 2020, Jason Parham wrote in Wired about TikTok’s “digital blackface,” the phenomenon where white users lip-synch to Black voices. This is just one particularly egregious example of the platform’s encouragement of blurring the boundaries between self and other; a different kind of appropriation happens when a fan makes a video lip-synching to Mitski’s “Nobody.” You can imagine how, having embodied Mitski by pretending her words are coming out of your mouth, a person might feel less like they love her and more like they are her. This phenomenon isn’t limited to Mitski, of course; it happens to any artist whose music blows up on the app. But not every artist is as committed to creating distance between themselves and their audience as she is.

In an interview after the Twitter furor over her request for less filming at concerts, Mitski remarked, “It does feel sad to be told directly by people I’m hoping to share my heart with, that to them I’m a product they have bought for the night, and they will do what they want with me while they have me. It is sad to go onstage and now be conscious of the fact that, to some of the people in front of me, I am a dancing monkey, and I better start dancing quick so they can get the content they’re paying for.”

Her recognition of the link between the work of music and the access to her people expect is no surprise, given how often references to the labor of trying to make it in the industry show up in her music. Mitski sings about living with her parents while she tries to break through in “Class of 2013”; her second album is called Retired From Sad, New Career in Business. One track in particular off The Land Is Inhospitable offers some insight into her difficult relationship with the job of music. On “I Don’t Like My Mind,” she sings about working herself to the bone in order to avoid being left alone with herself. In the wailing chorus, she pleads, “Please don’t take / Take this job from me.”

It’s true that without an audience Mitski wouldn’t have this job. But perhaps she also means to communicate that her audience, who needs too much, who tries to cross the boundaries she’s so carefully erected onstage and on her records, is also taking her dream job from her.

Mitski is promoting The Land Is Inhospitable with a series of concerts she’s calling Amateur Mistakes. These small, acoustic performances are mostly in Europe; the only North American dates are in New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Toronto. Surely not every fan who wants one will get a ticket. But maybe these shows are Mitski’s way of getting the job she wants: a little crowd, an acoustic guitar, and a night where she might cut the bathroom line unrecognized.

Charlotte Goddu is a writer and PhD student living in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Eater, and the Chicago Tribune.