When we last heard from Mitski, on 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, she was surveying vast wildernesses with an existential glint in her eye. Those days, it would seem, are gone. “Where’s My Phone?” announces Mitski’s eighth album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, on a note of anxious claustrophobia. Its insistent guitar chug harks back to the indie rock of Bury Me at Makeout Creek, but the song doesn’t stay there for long, melting into a foreboding orchestral swell and chorus of wordless voices.

According to a press release, this album’s main character is “a reclusive woman in an unkempt house,” and the video for “Where’s My Phone?” cranks up the tone of paranoia and psychic unease. Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, it shows our protagonist prowling around a gothic house, her mental state slowly unraveling until she entirely loses her cool on an outsider who dares to breach her sanctuary.

As a songwriter, Mitski harnesses resignation like no one else (hear her singsong, only slightly wry delivery of, “I keep thinking surely somebody will save me/At every turn I learn that no one will”). But her most powerful moments often come when she lets us accompany her far past her breaking point. The final moments of “Where’s My Phone?” erupt into a cathartic, fuzzed-out guitar solo—a taste of the gleefully warped drama promised on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me.