Mitski Brings Mania and Serenity to Residency at Hollywood High: Review

As Mitski played a five-night engagement at Hollywood High School this past week, any teachers who might have made it into the school auditorium for the shows must have been insanely jealous of how hushed her audiences were, at least between songs, when a hush was called for. Surely no school assembly ever held on the same premises was met with such polite silence. This was particularly notable given the very high level of Mitski Mania surrounding the underplays, which sold out in a virtual instant. Once inside, fans kept their hysteria on the inside, to the point that even Hollywood High’s librarians might have approved of their behavior.

It doesn’t hurt that her fans have been known to do their own shushing, without the need for any outside authoritarian intervention. I still worry about the fate of the poor soul who shouted “Mother is mothering!” at a concert a few years ago, drawing the scorn of everyone inside a huge hall, and going down in internet infamy; I can only presume he’s still in hiding.

This is not to say that the artist herself, and her band, were as quiet as church mice, or that there was anything unduly precious about the performance. Mitski gives good dynamics, and there were plenty of cathartic moments when some kind of solemnity gave way to a wail or a guitar squall, met with near-equal amounts of volume from a crowd that suddenly felt liberated to let it all out. I’d like to think that Mitski’s fans’ holding their tongues isn’t because they’re in fear — of her, each other, or a teacher who might suddenly intervene to rap their knuckles. She does engender a certain enrapturing, as well as healthy respect, and it’s music that exists at the highest level of quiet-core, when she’s not noisily harking back to her indie-rock roots.

It’s also possible that the cat got their tongues. Maybe it would go without saying that Mitski people are largely cat people, but the singer definitely cemented the connection when she brought out her latest album, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” with cat cover artwork, and included felines in the titles of two of the songs. (Downstairs at Hollywood High, in a school cafeteria that had been turned into a photo-op installation, you could even have your picture taken with a reproduction of the cover painting of a white cat with mismatched eyes.) In her very few interviews or explanations for the new album, Mitski has talked about how cats are often popularly identified as girls, and associated with unapologetic independence — two traits that can become demonized when they’re paired up. It’s not entirely a cat concept album, but you could leap to saying that her love is feline, all feline.

Mitski’s 2026 album and live show both differ in interesting ways from their immediate predecessors. The most obvious difference is in her performance style on this tour. (Calling the U.S. portion of it a “tour” is a bit of a misnomer, since so far it consists mostly just of two residencies, this one and a seven-night stand at the Shed in New York City. But presumably she’ll be back, after a lot of scheduled foreign dates.) On her 2024 tour behind the album “This Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” she adopted some of her older material to that record’s Americana-influenced, countrypolitan style, with rootsy multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin as a featured accompanist. This tour, however, is no-Fats and also no-fat, with her and just a basic guitar-bass-drums lineup. She’s said that barer-bones setup was originally going to be the m.o. for the new album, before she changed course and decided most of the tracks required orchestration or other additional instruments. But in this live setting, you get a strong sense of what the current album’s songs might’ve sounded like if she had stuck closer to that basic indie-rock ethos. The good news is, you could make a strong case that she made the right choice with the way the album offered expansive arrangements… and that she also made the right choice by stripping things back live. You can love the way the record turned out and also hope that she might put out a digital live album of the same material.

As proof of somewhat more raucous concept, Mitski at one point Thursday pointed to her producer/band leader/guitarist, Patrick Hyland, and remarked, “He’s actually bleeding. There’s blood on his hand from rocking too hard.” He did not hold any red digits up for us, but we took her word.

A few of the tracks on “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” left off the piano, strings or steel and stuck fairly close to the original concept of a straight rock-band album. It was no surprise those were among the highlights when she brought the material to the stage with this basic and tight a unit. That would very much include “Where’s My Phone?,” the perhaps deceptively loud and grungy single, and also the slow-burning, loud-erupting “If I Leave,” along with “Rules” and “That White Cat.” It’s fun how “Rules” is allowed to go off the rails at the end, as Mitski lets the counting go past 4 or 5 all the way up to an unruly 11, and in how “That White Cat” clangs hard and rough enough to leave a mark, just like the territory-claiming stray of the title is out to mark its territory.

Visually, the difference between this and the ’24 tour is much vaster. Then, she was a study in one-woman choreography, constantly striking photogenic poses with her arms, without and without a single chair at center stage that provided a sole prop to move around or stand on. On this tour, the postures struck are much fewer and farther in-between, or less planned and deliberate-seeming. In Thursday’s show, there was a section in the middle of “Dead Women” that she spent very, very, very slowly hiking her dress up, from beneath her knees nearly to crotch level, like the world’s slowest (and, if it fits in with the nature of the lyrics, angriest) act of foreplay. I figured that was a nightly stage mannerism, but then saw photos from other nights in the run where she wasn’t wearing a dress at all, so evidently not.

There is production design and a few props, but not to any overwhelming purpose, other than perhaps to suggest the house where a lady who loves rescue kitties might be thinking all these alternately independent and co-dependent thoughts about love and trust. For “Cats” (not to be confused with “That White Cat”!), she sat at a desk with a tiny lamp, musing about whether or not to transform herself back into “someone you still like.” For “Where’s My Phone?,” she literally picked up the pace, pacing back and forth and twirling until finally, as the song reached a frenzied climax, she threw herself face-first into a plush armchair at stage right. During “Heaven,” she twisted her body at a 45-degree angle. For the always crowd-pleasing “Washing Machine,” she pointed at herself, kind of hilariously, as she beseeched, “Baby will you kiss me already?… Why not me?” In “Dan the Dancer,” to match the fun, furious drumming, she danced around like… well, like a schoolgirl.

But these were more like performance anomalies than the showy rule of the evening. Much of the time, she just stayed centered, content to know she didn’t have to do much than deliver a vocal, with or without a dramatic stare into the balcony, to bring a rapt audience into her calmness. And then you’re doing a bunch of songs that kind of seem to be about mortality near the end (the new “Lightning,” definitely, and the encore of “Pearl Diver” from her debut album, probably), some stillness is probably in order.

“My Love Mine All Mine,” her biggest hit, was saved for the penultimate number of the main set. It might be shorter than just about anyone else’s signature song is, but she made the most of it, letting spotlights train on a pair of disco mirror half-balls affixed to the stage, briefly turning the Hollywood High auditorium into the site of a star-filled prom.

An even bigger difference in Mitski’s live show this time around is the sheer amount of film footage put up on screen behind her and the band, all of it chosen with some apparent thought toward the song being illustrated. “Where’s My Phone?” featured amusing scenes from the 1950s of women answering or talking on telephones; whoever compiled this footage actually managed to find a scene of a woman reaching out and searching for a missing phone — a landline, obviously, in those days — on her nightstand. The waltz “Heaven” was presented as a woman’s dream of dancing with a frilly-shirted flamenco dancer. “Rules” sported footage from instructional videos for etiquette for kids (“Thank the hostess!”). “Stay Soft,” a song Mitski has described as being “about hurt people finding each other, and using sex to make sense of their pain,” was amusingly accompanied by footage of Bela Lugosi and his female conquests (or sex-starved, willing victims?) in “Dracula.” The rocker “Francis Forever,” with its lines about “you don’t see me,” used footage from “The Invisible Man,” meanwhile, naturally. And the new song “I’ll Change for You,” which extols the merits of women drinking in bars without male companions, used footage of Ann Sheridan at a San Francisco bar in the classic 1950 film noir “Woman on the Run.”

Some of these visuals were used for comic or ironic effect, but there were spookier or more abstract moments in the juxtapositions, too. “A Horse Named Cold Air” mostly showed widescreen flowing water, albeit with a flash of a white horse, as quick and unnerving as David Lynch’s use of the same passing image in “Twin Peaks.” Possibly the best use of visuals all night came with the most basic: “I Leave You” was accompanied just by blank but scratched-up film stock — but, in the raging mid-section of the song, the scratches themselves got faster and more furious, before both the music and the film calmed down again. It was a simple but ingenious effect.

Mitski can come off as such a mystery during each performance segment that it comes almost as an abrupt surprise when she breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience a few times in the course of a performance… and reveals herself to be kinda a normal hang of a human being. At one point, she explained her intentions for having the show here, or at least what she hoped the result would be.

“It feels like cheating to do these shows at a high school,” she said. “We’re basically bringing y’all to possibly one of the most traumatizing places, get you all in emotional turmoil, sit you down, and then unleash this music on you. Ha ha ha ha. I got you primed.” But, she added encouragingly, “it’s dark in here. No one can see you. You can cry. I’m crying on the inside.”

As things came to a close, she prepped the audience: “The next song will be our last song.” Awwwww. “I know,” she responded, “but it’ll be nice to go home.” I can’t remember the last time I heard a performer assure her audience that leaving would be as enjoyable as coming. What good is sitting alone in your room? Plenty, in Mitski’s world, which, once again, she’s found a transformative way to put on stage.