Mitski

The breakout success of 2016's Puberty 2 saw Mitski hailed as the new vanguard of indie rock, the one to save the genre from the white dudes who've historically dominated it. But the often overlooked aspect of being a rising star is the sheer amount of work that goes into it. "I had been on the road for a long time, which is so isolating, and had to run my own business at the same time," Mitski explains, "a lot of this record was me not having any feelings, being completely spent, but then trying to rally myself and wake up and get back to Mitski. I was feeling really nihilistic and trying to make pop songs."

We want our artists to be strong but we also expect them to be vulnerable. Rather than avoiding this dilemma, she addresses directly the power that comes from appearing impenetrable and loneliness that follows. "With a lot of the romantic infatuations I've had," she says, "when I look back, I wonder, Did I want them or did I want to be them? Did I love them or did I want to absorb whatever power they had? I decided I could just be my own cowboy figure that I so desire." In Be The Cowboy, delves into the loneliness of being a symbol and the loneliness of being someone, and how it can feel so much like being no one.

• 1 Geyser
• 2 Why Didn't You Stop Me?
• 3 Old Friend
• 4 A Pearl
• 5 Lonesome Love
• 6 Remember My Name
• 7 Me and My Husband
• 8 
• 9 Come Into the Water
• 10 Nobody
• 11 Pink in the Night
• 12 A Horse Named Cold Air
• 13 Washing Machine Heart
• 14 Blue Light
• 15 Two Slow Dancers

Mitski warmly recalls a quote from sculptor El Anatsui, "Art grows out of each particular situation, and I believe that artists are better off working with whatever their environment throws up." With this nerve exposed lyrically, and having dived into her new beginning, Mitski chooses her 2014 breakthrough album Bury Me at Makeout Creek to explore uncharted sonic territory, trading in large string arrangements for guitar and bass. While studying composition at SUNY Purchase's music conservatory, she previously recorded music with a full orchestra. However as college graduation inched closer, Mitski moved away from the concert hall and into the campus' active DIY scene. Upon relocating to New York following graduation, she entered stages at Death By Audio, Silent Barn, and Bed Stuy basements, entrenching her songs of love, fear, lust, and brilliant clarity into entirely sympathetic ears.

Since releasing Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Mitski has received international acclaim for her distinct, arresting sound and profoundly reflective lyrics. Pitchfork applauded the release as "inventive and resourceful," while Rolling Stone celebrated her "deep-cutting lyrics." NME said of Bury Me, "it's a record that doesn't tug at your heart-strings as much as it mercilessly pounds at them, taking to your emotions like a lead pipe to a piñata." She has also received widespread attention for her "cathartic" live shows as dubbed by The New York Times' Jon Caramanica. "I was so young when I behaved 25," Mitski sings on "First Love / Late Spring," "yet now I find I've grown into a tall child." This veritable thesis speaks to sentiments of the poetry and beauty of struggling up the hill to adulthood.

Mitski follows El Anatsui's humbling advice, cathartically revealing snapshots from her adventures in youth, and the empowerment found in sharing these stories with others.

Tracks

1. Texas Reznikoff
2. Townie
3. First Love / Late Spring
4. Francis Forever
5. I Don't Smoke
6. Jobless Monday
7. Drunk Walk Home
8. I Will
9. Carry Me Out
10. Last Words of a Shooting Star

Vinyl LP pressing. The follow-up to 2014's 'Bury Me At Makeout Creek', named after a Simpsons quote and hailed by Pitchfork as "a complex 10-song story [containing] some of the most nuanced, complex and articulate music that's come from the indiesphere in a while," 'Puberty 2' picks up where it's predecessor left off. "It's kind of a two parter," explains Mitski. "It's similar in sound, but a direct growth [from] that record." Musically, there are subtle evolutions: electronic drum machines pulse throughout beneath Pixies-ish guitars, while saxophone lights up it's opening track. "I had a certain confidence this time. I knew what I wanted, knew what I was doing and wasn't afraid to do things that some people may not like."

• 1 Happy
• 2 Dan the Dancer
• 3 Once More to See You
• 4 Fireworks
• 5 Your Best American Girl 03:32
• 6 I Bet on Losing Dogs
• 7 My Body's Made of Crushed Little Stars
• 8 Thursday Girl
• 9 A Loving Feeling
• 10 Crack Baby
• 11 A Burning Hill

Vinyl LP pressing. 2023 release. Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what's truly hers, what can't be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. She hopes her album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she's gone. Listening to it, that's precisely how it feels: like a love that's haunting the land." This is my most American album," Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of it's private sorrows and painful contradictions. In this album, which is sonically Mitski's most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. The album is full of the ache of the grown-up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It's a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place - this earth, this America, this body - takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

Track List

1. Bug Like An Angel
2. Buffalo Replaced
3. Heaven
4. I Don't Like My Mind
5. The Deal
6. When Memories Snow
7. My Love Mine All Mine
8. The Frost
9. Star
10. I'm Your Man
11. I Love Me After You