Mitski

NOBODY

At 27, Mitski may still be young for the world, but as she approaches the release of her fifth album, Be the Cowboy, she’s going through something of a mid-career crisis—or at least a heavy spiritual reconsideration of what she wants and why. That’s largely because her singular pursuit—to be able to make a career of writing, recording, and performing music—has already come true, thanks to the devoted indie cult she’s cultivated over the past few years. “I can pay for my health insurance. I can eat. I can drink clean water. I can pay for a roof above my head. I’ve done it,” she tells me. “Now my goal is to only make music that I feel is necessary for me to make.”

When her record Bury Me at Makeout Creek was released in 2014, she was a largely unknown musician with two avant-classical-influenced singer-songwriter albums behind her. Makeout Creek abandoned her previous pomp and circumstance for a raw folk/rock hybrid sound with lyrics about isolation, desire, and boredom. It made being bummed sound fun.

2016’s Puberty 2 doubled down on the grit. Accented by distortion and drum machines, the album crystalized her songwriting as it ranged from pop-punk to indie to ballad to bubblegum. But each song contains its own universe, with Mitski as both its queen and sole resident, singing narratives of literal and metaphorical yearning. She’s a good singer, a little husky, a little saccharine, but it’s less the sound of her voice that’s so powerful than the tone of it. Loud or quiet, she exudes feeling, a gut-wrenching pleading with the world, asking for her little piece of it. When she sings “You’re the one, you’re all I ever wanted,” on her most popular song so far, “Your Best American Girl,” she does it with such conviction that you’ll rethink if anyone has in fact ever really wanted anyone else.

Be the Cowboy is a logical continuation of these albums’ themes, though it drops the drum machine and vocal fuzz for clarity of tone and hints of disco and showtunes. Misery is still front and center lyrically, but the musical outlook is a lot sunnier. “Nobody” is pure Studio 54, in a reach-for-the-stars way she’s never really done before. Even the more traditional indie songs feel pumped up. One of the album’s most intense moments, “Remember My Name,” deals with lofty dreams and their clash with reality: “I need something bigger than the sky/Hold it in my arms and know it’s mine/Just how many stars will I need to hang around me/To finally call it heaven.” It’s remarkable in its simultaneous display of hubristic aspiration and the vulnerability necessary to share it.

“I was always bothered when people say, ‘I cry to your music, it sounds like a diary, it sounds so personal,’” Mitski says. “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.’” This time, Mitski says, fans looking for lovelorn depression anthems telegraphed straight from her heart may be let down.“Every time someone on social media is like,‘I can’t wait to cry to your new album,’ I’m like,‘I don’t know if you’ll cry.I’m sorry.’”