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 barrelling 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.

“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.

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