New/Sealed
ROCK
DEAD OCEANS 0000350
UPC: 656605165011
Release Date: 9/15/2023
 
Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like 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,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave  behind all the love I have, after I die, so that 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 continue to shine that  love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a  love that’s haunting the land.

“This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her  seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this  country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. In this album,  which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to  be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is timetraveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star.

The album is 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, screaming in pain,  arching towards love. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then  rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes  active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.