Mitski

Mitski Miyawaki, who records as Mitski, built a reputation through candid songwriting paired with an indie rock approach that balances melodic hooks against emotional turbulence. While studying music she issued her opening pair of albums as required academic work. The 2014 label debut Bury Me at Makeout Creek, her first effort on guitar, carried a sharper emotional edge. Her childhood spent relocating across continents and the resulting questions of identity and place shaped that record and numbers such as the streaming success “Your Best American Girl,” which surfaced on the 2016 album Puberty 2; that project secured Top 20 placements on Billboard’s independent and alternative charts. Be the Cowboy in 2018 delivered her initial Billboard 200 entry. Laurel Hell, which climbed to the Top Five in 2022, favored polished arrangements that recalled 1980s pop while presenting songs that were simultaneously plaintive and self-motivating. The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We arrived the next year with acoustic and country textures, occasionally augmented by orchestra and choir, and produced the international Top 40 single “My Love Mine All Mine.”

Born in Japan to an American father and Japanese mother, Miyawaki relocated through at least thirteen countries on several continents before enrolling at college in New York City. She began composing shortly after finishing high school in Turkey, where “Bag of Bones” became her earliest completed track and later appeared on her debut album. After entering Hunter College for film studies she pivoted to music and transferred to SUNY Purchase, where she recorded the piano-centered LUSH in 2012 and Retired from Sad, New Career in Business in 2013 as her junior and senior projects; the latter deployed a sixty-piece student orchestra. The demands of those releases plus outside employment contributed to exhaustion that informed Bury Me at Makeout Creek, which Double Double Whammy issued in 2014 and which was tracked primarily in temporary home spaces with friends rather than through her prior classical piano lens, favoring raw guitar instead.

Dead Oceans signed her in late 2015 and released Puberty 2 in June 2016. Bolstered by the streaming hit “Your Best American Girl,” the album launched with North American and European dates that began at Austin’s SXSW festival. The set earned broad critical praise, appearing in the year-end Top 25 of Rolling Stone, SPIN, and Entertainment Weekly, while also charting on Billboard’s alternative, rock, independent, and Heatseekers lists. Be the Cowboy followed in 2018, again produced by Patrick Hyland, and examined a domestic female perspective through an approach that remained intimate yet turbulent. The album reached the Top Ten on Billboard’s alternative, rock, and independent charts and peaked at number 52 on the Billboard 200, additionally entering the Top 100 in Canada, the U.K., and Ireland.

After closing the decade with heavy touring, Mitski composed the score and songs for the graphic novel This Is Where We Fall, issued on cassette by Z2 Comics in mid-2021 alongside the book. She also supplied “Cop Car” to the soundtrack of the 2020 horror film The Turning, appearing with Courtney Love, Warpaint, and girl in red. Laurel Hell, again produced by Hyland, emerged in February 2022 with isolation-themed material built on synthesizers and electric piano, debuting at number five on the Billboard 200. The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We was tracked with Hyland in East Nashville and Los Angeles and surfaced in September 2023; drawing cited inspiration from Ennio Morricone, Faron Young, and Arthur Russell, the largely intimate, country-leaning album sparingly integrated orchestra and a seventeen-piece choir. The ballad “My Love Mine All Mine” became her first Hot 100 Top 40 entry at number 26 and reached the Top Ten in the U.K., Ireland, and New Zealand. ~ Marcy Donelson