The title is a trap. “Where’s My Phone?” sounds like the kind of throwaway question you mutter whilst patting down your pockets in a Tesco queue.
But Mitski isn’t asking about a device. She’s asking where she went, and by the time you realise the bait-and-switch, you’re already three minutes deep into a Gothic psychological collapse scored by guitars that sound like they’ve been dragged through gravel.
This is the first single from Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, and that title tells you everything about where Mitski’s head is at.
After mapping endless rural isolation on The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, she’s now locked herself inside a decaying manor house where the walls are closing in and the neighbours won’t stop knocking.
The shift from exterior to interior matters. Wide-open spaces allow for contemplation. Four walls breed claustrophobia. And claustrophobia breeds violence.
The shift from exterior to interior matters. Wide-open spaces allow for contemplation. Four walls breed claustrophobia. And claustrophobia breeds violence.
The video, directed by Noel Paul and inspired by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, makes this visceral.
Mitski plays a woman protecting her younger sister from intruders, from carol singers, from anyone who threatens their hermetic existence.
When a man throws rocks at the window, she beats him with a shovel. The act isn’t triumphant. It’s desperate, mechanical, the kind of violence that comes from someone who’s already lost the plot but hasn’t realised it yet.
Meanwhile, the lyrics tell a different story entirely. “I keep thinking, surely, somebody will save me / At every turn, I learn that no one will.”
There’s no protection here, no rescue. Just the slow acceptance that the house will fall and she’ll fall with it.
What everyone’s missing is that the phone is a red herring. The real question comes in the chorus when “Where’s my phone?” morphs into “Where’d I go?” That’s the fracture.
Mitski isn’t mourning a lost object; she’s mourning the version of herself that used to know where she was, who she was, what she wanted.
The repetition hammers this home. By the third chorus, the words stop sounding like a question and start sounding like a mantra, the kind of thing you repeat when you’re trying to convince yourself you still exist.
Sonically, Patrick Hyland’s production does something clever. The track opens with fuzzy indie rock that harks back to Bury Me at Makeout Creek, all jagged guitars and lo-fi grit.
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But halfway through, it melts into something far more unsettling: orchestral swells, wordless choir vocals, a breakdown that feels less like a bridge and more like a nervous breakdown.
It’s Mitski at her most theatrical, and theatre requires an audience. The question is whether she’s performing for us or for herself.
The imagery of “clear glass” and “clear wax” deserves attention. She wants her mind to be empty, transparent, nothing rattling around inside.
But then she shifts to wanting to be “like a bug floating in the melted amber of a citronella candle.” That’s not emptiness. That’s preservation.
Being trapped in wax means you’re suspended, unchanging, fossilised. It’s the opposite of the clear glass she claims to want.
This contradiction is the song’s secret engine. Mitski doesn’t actually want to disappear.
She wants to stop moving forward, stop becoming whatever she’s becoming, stop the inevitable decay of staying alive.
The domestic horror angle isn’t accidental. Between this and the references to Grey Gardens scattered across the album rollout, Mitski’s building a narrative about women who retreat from the world and the world’s subsequent punishment for that retreat.
Outside the house, she’s a deviant. Inside, she’s free. But that freedom comes with a price.
The house rots, the mind fractures, and the phone stays missing because the call was never coming anyway.
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What makes “Where’s My Phone?” work is that Mitski refuses to resolve the tension.
The song doesn’t end with clarity or catharsis. It ends with that fuzzed-out guitar solo, a moment of pure noise that sounds like static, like interference, like the sound of a signal cutting out.
She’s still lost. The house is still falling. And no one’s coming to save her because she stopped answering the door years ago.