Mitski: Be the Cowboy [DEAD OCEANS]

Why you'll love it

Be the Cowboy was named the best album of 2018 by Pitchfork and became Mitski's breakthrough, the first record where she sounds definitively like no one but herself.

This edition

• Be the Cowboy on vinyl
• Dead Oceans pressing

About the album

Mitski was already confidently setting herself up as an artist of the David Bowie / PJ Harvey / Radiohead variety (an artist committed to shattering expectations and refusing to make the same album twice) by the time Be the Cowboy rolled around to much excitement in the middle of 2018. This, however, is the record where she made it official. Recorded and composed, as she told Out magazine at the time, with "the image of someone alone on a stage," it's an interesting hybrid of all things Mitski that preceded it.

It brings the piano balladry of her early, self-made student albums back into play while hanging onto the fuzz-toned guitars that gave 2014's Bury Me at Makeout Creek and 2016's Puberty 2 their edge. It's a landmark work, topping numerous year-end best-of lists, including Pitchfork's, and earning her highest chart placements yet in the US, the UK and Canada. She had officially "arrived."

Also at Kops: more Mitski on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Dead Oceans, first out in 2018.