There’s long been an unpredictable quality to Mitski. Maybe the sense that anything could happen with her stems from the strange path she took from critic-championed cult hero to semi-mainstream icon capable of pushing albums into the Billboard top ten. Realistically, though, the mercurial muse she follows has always been present, its shimmering results pressed right into the grooves of all her albums. Indeed, her capacity for the unexpected has been there so long that it’s circled all the way around to actually come across as oddly comforting in its dependability.

Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, Mitski’s eighth full-length studio album, sounds like nothing she’s made before and everything she’s made before at the same time. She works again with producer Patrick Hyland, a mainstay from almost the very beginning of her career, and her most recent touring band joins her in the studio. There’s a determination and fullness to what they create. Mitski doesn’t seem particularly interested in reaching out to the listener. She plants her flag with the confidence that anyone who can properly hear what she’s saying will come to her.

Album opener “In a Lake” initially moves like a gentle folk shanty, but the lyrics are more barbed as Mitski sings of small towns keeping people locked into their first-impression reputations: “And everywhere you go makеs your heart ache/ When you’vе done enough walks of shame/ Some days, you just go the long way/ To stay off of memory lane.” The lilt eventually gives way to something more cacophonous, which is one of Mitski’s most common and cunning tricks. Another memorable usage of this occurs on “If I Leave,” which slinks along like the brokenhearted torch song of a lo-fi chanteuse but also makes space for a burst of tangled, beautiful pop noise. It’s another way to implicitly argue that we all contain multitudes.

Although Mitski’s words can draw blood, her music on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me often has a lightness about it. “Rules” is jaunty enough to recall the Natalie Merchant era of 10,000 Maniacs, and “I’ll Change for You” has a kinship with the lovely chamber pop of the Carpenters, right down to the heartache embedded in the chorus (“‘Cause I’ll do anything/ For you to love me again/ If you don’t like me now/ I will change for you”). There’s even a tingle of surf rock at the opening of “That White Cat.”

The lyrics are often tinged with sadness and regret, a longing for a different path than the one that she’s on. It not a sad-sack lament so much as a shrugging solidarity with the rest of humanity. Everyone feels that way sometimes, right? Mitski is simply at our service, providing the soundtrack. Perhaps she always has been. Perhaps she always will be.