This lively new mood only underscores Mitski’s repeated rejection of the way that people tend to characterize her work as “sad girl music.” In a 2018 Pitchfork profile, the artist shared, “I was always bothered when people say, ‘I cry to your music, it sounds like a diary, it sounds so personal.’ Yes, it is personal. But that’s so gendered. There’s no feeling of, ‘Oh, maybe she’s a songwriter and she wrote this as a piece of art.’”

That flattening of Mitski’s work has only been accelerated by the rise of TikTok, where songs like “My Love Mine All Mine,” have repeatedly gone viral. While the video sharing app is now a must-have marketing tool for musicians, the very format of TikTok encourages an almost gleeful decontextualization of song snippets.

And although social media loves Mitski, she doesn’t love social media back. In a 2022 interview with Huck magazine, the singer said, “It is sad to go on stage and now be conscious of the fact that, to some of the people in front of me, I am a dancing monkey, and I better start dancing quick so they can get the content they’re paying for.”

All of the above could perhaps explain why Mitski’s getting a little silly with it in her live shows now. In particular, I’m thinking about what some are calling the “folk” or “jolly” version of “I Don’t Smoke” that she performs on tour. In recorded form, the track is the devastating low point of Mitski’s sophomore album Bury Me at Makeout Creek. Lyrics like, “If your hands need to break more than trinkets in your room / You can lean on your arm as you break my heart,” are paired with slow, distortion-heavy guitar chords.

On the road, Mitski instead transforms “I Don’t Smoke” into an upbeat folk ditty, complete with fiddles, organ riffs, and choreography that resembles the moves you might find at a line dance party. As one TikToker wrote, “she’s so very unserious.”

Calling her “unserious” and “silly” does not devalue the performance value of Mitski’s work at all — if anything, it’s quite the opposite. First of all, it’s an appropriate turn for this album cycle; Mitski has described The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We as her “most American album,” and the record does indeed utilize the sonic palette of Americana.

Beyond that though, she’s taking what is arguably the saddest song in her discography and transforming it in a way that completely fucks with her audience’s expectations of “sad girl performance.” From an artist who seems constantly at odds with the way that her audience treats her, this feels like — dare I say — a powerful reclamation of her own work.

Mitski will be playing throughout the U.S. until September, when the tour concludes in Stanford, California.

Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.