Nobody steps on stage quite like Mitski. Most performers greet their audience by either bounding enthusiastically into the spotlight, racing on anxiously or shuffling on inconspicuously. Mitski walks out to the microphone in long, even, deliberate strides, almost as if carried on conveyor belt. Other artists make their excitement, cockiness and/or nervousness to be on stage palpable, but Mitski arrives like she’s been summoned there. It’s not a particularly emotional action, it is merely where she is supposed to be.
It’s a fair first impression from an artist who has engaged in as much push-pull with the concept of pop stardom — and with a fanbase that both lavished her with pop star-level adoration and placed pop star-level demands on her even before she started legitimately achieving pop star-level popularity — as any artist of the past decade. Meanwhile, she has both leaned into and recoiled from her ballooning success at various points in recent years, often with counterintuitive results: When she took a self-care hiatus from performing at the turn of the decade (and then the world shut down anyway), she got bigger than ever on TikTok; when she released an album full of scorching synth-rock singles at the height of her virality, it faded from commercial view with surprising speed; when she followed that a couple years later with an album full of dusty Americana ballads, one of them became her first-ever Billboard Hot 100 crossover hit.
You can almost feel a decision being made, both while listening to Mitski’s excellent new album Nothing’s About to Happen to Me and watching Monday night’s (Mar. 2) transfixing kickoff to her six-night residency at New York multi-purpose cultural center The Shed, that the artist was done trying to figuring out how much to play into or run from audience expectations — she was just going to stride out there and do what she was meant to do. While the performance was not as theatrical or choreographed as some of her recent tours, Mitski’s stone-faced intensity, increasingly powerful voice and purposeful, composed movements still gave the performance a dramatic edge, both in terms of the emotional stakes and the one-way nature of the show. When she dropped the imaginary wall between audience and performer halfway through to finally acknowledge the crowd with a big, friendly “Hello, hiya!” it was more rattling than any of the set’s mini-strobefests.
But while Mitski was certainly not taking requests on Monday night — and left several of her biggest crowd-pleasers on the table, including “First Love/Late Spring,” “Your Best American Girl” and “Nobody,” though she still has five nights left to hit on ’em if she wants — it’s still hard to imagine the complaints anyone could have with such a fully invested and brilliantly considered performance. She has the presence, the catalog and the fanbase to be headlining Madison Square Garden right now, but she’s still likely better served playing for the same sized crowds spread over a week at a multi-purpose art space, where can better control the details of her delivery, and not feel overwhelmed either by the crowds or how larger-than-life herself she has to become to match them. In a venue like The Shed, it feels like artist and audience have found the best way to properly appreciate one another.
“I love you,” Mitski swore to the two thousand-plus fans in attendance after introducing the night’s final song. “I know you don’t believe me, but I do.”
Here are the five best moments from Mitski’s residency-opening performance.
