In early January, a set of cryptic teasers appeared on Mitski’s dormant social-media accounts: They show the notoriously private indie-rock star — America’s “best young songwriter,” per The Guardian, and unwilling TikTok fave — waltzing around an old Victorian house. Dressed in eccentric garb (bowler hats, tartan coats), she peers out from magnifying glasses, hums around the kitchen, and collapses to the floor. The fan theories and memes unspooled from there.

This opaqueness is typical for Mitski. The more famous she’s become, the more she’s retreated, declining press and refracting her confessional sensibilities through a parade of characters. Days after the teasers dropped, Mitski announced her eighth studio album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, which she’ll release on February 27. She forwent the usual album bio for a brief synopsis (“The main character of this album is a reclusive woman in an unkempt house,” not Mitski) and a short sampler of quotes: “You get very independent when you live alone. You get to be a real individual,” reads one from the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, about misfit relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis living at a decaying estate.

Mitski’s publicist told me she would be refusing all written interviews about the album. So instead, I spoke to Mitski’s creative director and graphic designer, Mary Banas, who started working with the musician six years ago, and photographer Lexie Alley, who shot the promo photos and filmed the video teasers. Ahead of the album’s release and Mitski’s six-show residency at New York’s The Shed, they clued me in to the fictional world of Tansy House, the Gothic mansion that she inhabits on the album, and its symbolism.

When did you two start working with Mitski?
Mary Banas: We started working together in 2018 on her fifth studio album, Be the Cowboy. Before that, she had made her own album art, so she completely understands the process. Collaborating with her is really generous.

My approach is about amplifying what’s already there — letting the visuals function as another gesture of the music. With Mitski, we usually begin in a period of relative seclusion, just the two of us brainstorming, translating ideas from language to form and, honestly, dream-weaving. For her album Laurel Hell, I let my hand draw a line while listening to each track, and those lines became the “map” on the inside gatefold. For The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, Mitski gave me a mixtape — not the album itself but a soundscape — plus the body of work she created with photographer Ebru Yildiz, now available as a book. At the end of the process, I make a huge Google Slides deck with typography and photo references. Once the album package art is locked in, I distill the system — key words, fonts, color palette — into a style guide that can be used as a point of reference for other artists collaborating on the album.

Lexie Alley: I’d worked with Mitski’s management company, Good Harbor, and their other musician clients before. At the beginning of 2024, they asked me to come out to a few shows for her last album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. I started in Philly, then shot Toronto, Boston, and all of the NYC dates. Her choreography is inspired by the Japanese dance-theater tradition of butoh, specifically the school of thought of Kazuo Ohno. It was so free and unconventional. The work lighting designer Andi Watson did was also very cinematic with endless black and starry shards — it felt like working with the void and our subconscious, something that is a focus of mine.

Photo: Lexie Alley

Mary, how did the process of building out the world for this record start?
M.B.: We were thinking about the house as a psychological container and what people inherit emotionally, psychologically, as well as physically — how objects can represent a lineage. Grey Gardens was a touchpoint, but less feral than that. We were thinking about old money in decline, somebody who doesn’t have cash anymore but they have designer gowns. One thing we were sure about is Mitski’s character having a bunch of cups around because she doesn’t clean up after herself.

Shirley Jackson came right away as a reference. Mitski was like, “Have you read The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle?” Then she had this vision of cats: a blissfully unaware cat and then another cat pouncing. We chose Marc Burckhardt for the album’s cover art. He paints everything in an old-world style, starting with black-and-white underpainting and then adding color before scanning the result into the computer. There is so much symbolism in his work. It’s influenced by folklore. His animals look like they possess human knowledge.

The character comes from somewhere in New England, which I’m pretty sure comes from Shirley Jackson, though Tansy House is not a real place. We landed on this fictional address:

Tansy House
Harbinger Place, Portent
453-1916

Where does the name “Tansy House” come from?
M.B.: Mitski and I like to use the historical, or Victorian, meaning for flowers because I am fascinated with the human desire to control nature, tame it, own it, give it meaning. A tansy is an optimistic-looking flower. It’s like a bunch of stems with these pom-poms at the top. It’s seen as a weed and used as an insect repellent, but it’s also a charm for infertility, made into a drinkable tea for abortions. For Harbinger Place, Portent — harbinger means “omen” or “warning,” and it sounds like it could be in New England. The phone number also contains meaning, but I am going to let the fans decode that!

Before this interview, you sent two additional references: Todd Selby’s photos of Iris and Carl Apfel in their home and the designer Vivienne Westwood. How do they fit in the world of this album?
M.B.: Selby photographed creatives of all stripes in their spaces. You see the person’s life reflected back in their surroundings. This particular photo shoot was just great because the house is very maximalist; there’s a strong sense of opulence mixed with a little bit of crazy, like a funny animal face. Every object in that shoot looks like there’s a story to it.

Vivienne Westwood was also intuitive. She was able to mix different eras and silhouettes together — something conservative like a tweed jacket but then completely turn it upside down.

Lexie, you received a big creative deck from Mary. Where does your mind go from there?
L.A.: The first things that stood out were the Vivienne Westwood and the tansy-tea details, which gave me a female-revolutionary feeling. I immediately knew I wanted Francesca Woodman as a reference. Her portraits like Self-Portrait Talking to Vince, ca. 1976–77, and Self-deceit #1, Rome, Italy, 1978, are a lot about self-exploration. They take place in a sort of dilapidated house, and her spaces are a lot more ghostly and empty. And because she’s alone, she’s doing weird, contorted poses or making faces or crawling on the ground. I knew we were exploring the void, everything around the actual physical thing. I have a psych degree, and I’m looking at the subconscious and trying to figure out what makes a person who they are.

I also thought of two experimental filmmakers who I really, really love: Narcisa Hirsch and Takashi Ito. Their work is abstract and nonnarrative, a challenge to the senses. I used some classic horror-movie techniques, like Dutch angles, extreme close-ups. We wanted to elicit feelings while leaving fans to form their own interpretations. I didn’t storyboard anything.

Where and when did you shoot the photos?
L.A.: We shot in early May 2025 at a historic building in L.A. We searched around for spaces that just felt right, starting with anything around the Victorian era. The building had colored glass in some of the windows and a ton of objects in it already.

How did you decide which props to add?
L.A.: When the production designer Brian Spadafora and I were discussing what to include in the house, we just wanted to see what we could get and let the themes and the meaning start to bubble up off that. I also brought some of my own stuff from my house: a bunch of dog leashes and collars that we hung in the back and a bunch of glasses.

M.B.: I remember Mitski talking about wanting some contemporary tech objects.

L.A.: We wanted to show that we’re in the present. That’s why we had computers mixed with old little Victorian lamps. I grew up in the ’90s, where you had a computer sort of in the kitchen and dial-up and your mom’s yelling at you because she’s on a call. She’s probably cleaning the crystal glasses in the cabinet at some point, and they’re all laid out. It’s a real-life situation but maybe exaggerated.

I purposefully left it open so that she could explore the scene. I hadn’t heard the album. So when she’s humming in the kitchen, I had no idea what the song was or that it was the single. When she was cooking and looking at the recipe book, I had no idea she would do that. It ended up being such a perfect intro to the album, I think.

Photo: Lexie Alley

Mary, how did you come up with the concept of turning the deluxe-edition album’s gatefold into Tansy House?
M.B.: I was doing a lot of research on houses in fine art, like looking at Untitled (Glass House), by Therman Statom, and at the same time poring over the illustrations in this book on Victorian architecture. I have always been interested in the attention to detail in Victorian-style houses because they read as evidence of care to me, and they also embody the idea that the beauty of our surroundings is important. The Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Philadelphia Museum of Art have lived in my mind since I saw them for the first time a few years ago, and they were in my 129-page deck. I was struck by how much pleasure a shift in scale can bring. The handwork and attention to craft that it took to create those rooms is also such a marvel. They function as educational tools for styles, eras, and time periods, which is fun.

At what point did you listen to the album?
L.A.: I heard it at the end of last year, so two or three months ago. That was a huge gift to me because I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it before the visual elements were completed. It was amazing to see how everything fits together.

M.B.: I still haven’t. There are always concerns about leaks, so I feel like I am being more respectful if I don’t have the files.

One last question, just for fun: If you could be at a dinner party with anyone, who would you choose?
L.A.: I would pick Cy Twombly. He’s one of my biggest inspirations, and I would love to pick his brain. His style is very abstract, a mix of Grecian and Roman influences mixed with a very childlike scribble sort of thing.

M.B.: Mine’s Jenny Holzer. She modeled something that felt important to me. I really appreciate that she still speaks out for social justice with her work. And I love language and typography.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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