Mitski just released her eighth studio album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, on Friday via Dead Oceans, and has shared the video for album standout, “If I Leave.” Following “I’ll Change For You,” her “bossa nova-infused tune of desperation” (The Needle Drop), Mitski now presents a tale of conflict and reluctance with “If I Leave.” Displaying her “peerless ability to sound refined and overwhelmed all at once” (Stereogum), she sings: “If I leave // Somebody else will find you // But nobody else could see me // Quite as clearly as you.”
The “If I Leave” video, directed by Jared Hogan, is at once stunning, unsettling, and darkly funny. Set in a house breathing with menace and history, each room carries its own traces of the lives and eerie moments it once contained. Mitski and members of her band perform within these spooky spaces with calm indifference, their straight forward presence grounding us even as the rooms around them bristle with unease. The house is the true character here; Mitski and her music are the throughline tying its eras and horrors together.
