We’re barely two weeks into 2026 and nobody wants to be here. That’s the sense, anyway, from a new social media trend which involves posting wistful photos from the halcyon year of 2016. In some obvious ways, Mitski’s new single ‘Where’s My Phone?’ is a throwback, too. Its jaunty, unabashedly fuzzy guitars already have longtime fans invoking ‘Bury Me At Makeout Creek’, the 2014 album she recorded in houses and makeshift studios. The American artist’s more recent material has been defined by stately, melodic balladry – not least ‘My Love Mine All Mine’, the 2023 viral single that was Mitski’s entry on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
‘Where’s My Phone?’ is an energetic change of pace, and not just because we’re hearing gritty guitars again casually obscure and slowly swallow Mitski’s voice, which in her recent chamber-pop outings has been isolated in the spotlight, gently cushioned by beautiful and sometimes ornate instrumentation. One of indie’s most offline songwriters (she quit social media in 2019) has returned with a chorus that could double as a digital native’s panicked inner monologue. Is the bleep of the word ‘fuck’ in the second verse a cheeky nod to TikTok and its self-censoring contortions?
Thankfully, Mitski is too dignified to lurch headfirst into our brainrot era. “I’ll stay out until my mind is like a clear glass / A clear glass with nothing going on,” she sings, crafting another compelling, timeless image in a canon full of them; the “bug floating in the melted amber of a citronella candle” nods to the sad, squashed insect of ‘Bug Like An Angel’. She also refuses a full regression to performing stripped-back, guitar-forward ‘authenticity’ and instead hams it up as a housebound paranoiac in Noel Paul’s zany, character-packed music video, which was inspired by a Shirley Jackson novel. After dwelling in ‘Laurel Hell’ and contending with an inhospitable land, on her eighth album Mitski declares ‘Nothing’s About To Happen To Me’. ‘Where’s My Phone?’ is a welcome first dose of delusion.
Mitski’s ‘Nothing’s About To Happen To Me’ is out February 27 on Dead Oceans.