One Week to Go: Mitski Plays Manila for the First Time

There is a particular kind of longing that Mitski has always known how to name through her art. It is the kind that lives quietly in the body, like something you carry through ordinary days until a song cracks it open. For Mitski’s Filipino fans, that longing has had a specific form: the knowledge that she was out there, making music that felt like it was written for you specifically, and that she had never played a show in the Philippines.

That changes on July 14.

Mitski will perform at the SM Mall of Asia Arena for her first-ever concert in the country as part of her Nothing’s About to Happen to Me world tour. But this isn’t a typical tour. In April, Mitski posted a video explaining her decision to scale back on performing. “Right now, I feel a stronger pull towards writing more,” she said. “And in order to do that, I just have to cut back on performing.” Rather than a sprawling city-to-city run, she chose a handful of residencies and select shows across four continents. Manila is among the very last of them.

To further understand why this show matters, it helps to trace how she got here. She self-released her first two albums while still in college, building a following on the strength of her raw and emotionally precise writing. Some regarded her third album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, as a turning point in her career, while Puberty 2 was on multiple top albums of 2016 lists. By the time Be the Cowboy arrived in 2018, she had crossed over from cult favorite to one of the most talked-about songwriters of her generation. (I mean, her lyrics end up tattooed on strangers and scrawled in the margins of journals!)

Her eighth album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, was released in February. It is a theatrical record built around a reclusive woman in an unkempt house, and its sounds move through orchestral swells, bluesy-jazz shimmer, and shoegazing guitar fury. It is, like most things she makes, simultaneously a story about a character and a mirror held up to whoever is listening.

Her live shows have always been something more than concerts. They are deliberate and emotionally charged. To finally have one here, in a room full of people who have been waiting years to share it, feels like something worth marking.

Mitski said she feels more excited about writing than she has in years. For Filipino fans, that makes July 14 something rare: a first visit, on a tour she has already decided will be one of her shortest. Catch her while she’s here.

Limited tickets still available.

Mitski ‘Nothing’s About to Happen to Me’ in Manila is presented by PULP Live World.

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