Mitski - The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We - CASSETTES

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. InchThe best thing I ever did in my life was to love people, Inch Mitski says. InchI 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.Inch 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.Inch This is my most American album, Inch Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of it's 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 time-traveling 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.