Mitski
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (Dead Oceans)
Contact Jessica Linker about Mitski
Mitski’s new album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, is out today via Dead Oceans. Alongside the album’s release, Mitski presents the A.G. Rojas-directed “My Love Mine All Mine” video. “My Love Mine All Mine” is an instant classic, hailed by Exclaim! as “both heartbreaking and hopeful, the kind of careful balance that Mitski has fine tuned in the decade since her debut.” It’s the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone: “Moon, a hole of light/Through the big top tent up high/Here before and after me/Shining down on me/Moon, tell me if I could/Send up my heart to you/So when I die, which I must do/Could it shine down here with you.”
Mitski’s most sonically expansive, epic, and wise album to-date, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We was produced with Patrick Hyland and recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, incorporating an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson as well as a full choir of 17 people — 12 in Los Angeles and 5 in Nashville — arranged by Mitski. For the first time it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio to create this new sublime sound.
Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. The album is full of the ache of the grown-up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. 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, screaming in pain, arching towards love.
Surrounding the album’s release, Mitski is playing a series of intimate, acoustic album preview performances entitled Amateur Mistake, with dates in Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto, alongside six European and UK performances. All shows are sold out.
Portions of the above text are pulled from The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We bio by Will Arbery.
