Watch: Mitski Unleashes Quiet, Impactful Single, “Bug Like an Angel,” Details New Album

Mitski drops “Bug Like an Angel” music video, unveiling new details for her upcoming album. The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We arrives on Sept. 15.

Being a quiet little song, the opening single of “Bug Like an Angel” sees the singer-songwriter conveying the deepest meanings using the simplest forms. Confrontational and hard-hitting, “Bug Like an Angel” is a song that leaves listeners forever changed after listening.

Directed by Noel Paul, the green-blue themed music video follows a drunk woman, who stumbled down a street into a choir—and Mistki is amongst the singers. With an acoustic guitar and a blue robe, the song tackles the theme of self-destruction and community, elevating the theme of brokenness and loneliness.

“Did you go and make promises you can’t keep? Well, when you break them, they break you right back.” From the lowest lows, her thought-provoking lyrics carry a sort of gaze that seems to be piercing through the noises of this world, at the same time, echoing to the quiet guitar, plucked on the low end and the interplay between a lonesome voice and a choir in an almost hymnal form.

“Bug Like an Angel” is the opening song on The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We that spans 11 tracks, tackling anything from Arthur Russell to Ennis Morrisons. The singer-songwriter revealed that she wrote each song during “little bursts over the past few years” while she was overwhelmed by the things she noticed around her.

“There are a lot of things about working in the music industry, and about being in the public eye, that feels like it goes against my nature,” Mitski wrote in a newsletter update. “I think you all might have seen me struggle with it, from time to time! But I am also in a miraculously luckily position, to be able to make music with resources and time, and to have an audience like you who give me the opportunity to perform. Ultimately, I recognised that I really want to keep making music, and I’m willing to take the difficult stuff with the wonderful stuff—like any job, or relationship, or worthwhile thing in life.”

Bury Me at Makeout Creek is Mitski’s break-out album, but her sound and style has widened so much since her 2013 album, and so was her star power. Laurel Hell, her fifth album arrived in early 2022 with its lead single “The Only Heartbreaker” topped the Billboard Adult Alternative Airplay chart.