“There’s a deal you can make/ On a midnight walk alone…” croons Mitski on her seventh album. Loaded with pedal steel, fiddle, chirruping cicadas, howling dogs and Tex-Mex trumpet, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We finds the woman widely hailed as “America’s best young songwriter” sounding like Nancy Sinatra’s vengeful ghost, as she mines a rich, dark seam of swooning Americana.
Born in Japan in 1990 – the daughter of an American father and Japanese mother – Mitski Miyawaki had lived in 13 different countries by the time she hit her teens. “I didn’t fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American,” she said back in 2016, “so to survive I created this ‘ideal America’.” Settling in the US, aged 15, it came as a shock to her to realise: “Oh, I don’t belong here, either.” Her breakthrough album, Puberty 2 , found her exposing the hollow core of high-school rom-com America and its “pinky promise kisses”, while on last year’s Laurel Hell, she used Eighties synth pop to explore her frustration with capitalism and female beauty standards.
