Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is Mitski’s eighth studio album, and by track four she’s no longer reaching; she’s waiting. “If I Leave” doesn’t chase your attention. It holds it.
“If I Leave” is about obsession: the only reason to stay in a relationship is because the other person is the only one who truly sees and forgives you, while everyone else, friends, family, colleagues, has no idea who you actually are. The whole song lives in that gap.
The track pulls the quiet/loud dynamics back from her earlier catalogue, and you can hear exactly why.
Where “Townie” from 2014’s Bury Me at Makeout Creek drove forward on sheer momentum and “Your Best American Girl” from Puberty 2 two years later built from a quiet strum into a crashing wall of distorted guitar, “If I Leave” climbs toward that same breaking point and then pulls back into the same dread it started with.
Producer Patrick Hyland keeps the drums restrained, the guitars climbing in increments, and the track reaches what should be a release point before dropping you back where you started.
The song doesn’t want catharsis. It wants you stuck.
“Only you know, I’ve let only you know” isn’t romantic. It’s an admission of total dependence delivered with a flatness that makes it worse.
Not pleading, just stating the problem the way you state something you’ve already accepted.
On the surface, Jared Hogan’s official video captures a gothic atmosphere; an eerie derelict house, Victorian dress, broken dolls scattered across bedroom floors.
Stop there and you’ve missed it. A noose hangs in a doorway while the band plays around her. That image isn’t set dressing. It’s the word the lyric refuses to say out loud.
The noose stays in the doorway. The dolls stay on the floor. The song keeps not ending.
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