Mitski: Bury Me at Makeout Creek [DEAD OCEANS]

Why you'll love it

This is where the Cult of Mitski started: "Townie," "First Love / Late Spring" and "Francis Forever" turned a Purchase College grad into one of indie rock's most devoted-to artists, and it has stayed in print ever since.

This edition

• Single LP, 10 tracks
• Dead Oceans pressing of the 2014 album
• Produced by Patrick Hyland

About the album

Bury Me at Makeout Creek is such a surefooted, fully formed piece of work that it's hard to believe Mitsuki Miyawaki's previous two albums, 2012's Lush and 2013's brilliantly titled Retired From Sad, New Career in Business, were student projects recorded while she was studying studio composition at the State University of New York's Purchase College. Here, though, was the larger world's introduction to Mitski, one of the future reigning queens of the 21st-century Sad Girls.

First out in late 2014, Bury Me at Makeout Creek is a raw-nerved, uncomfortably-but-also-cathartically intimate slice of confessional indie-pop that understands as well as Elliott Smith did that folk music and punk rock can easily be two sides of the same coin. The Cult of Mitski began to gather in earnest, and a succession of labels, from Double Double Whammy to Dead Oceans, has faithfully kept the record in print while Ms. Miyawaki has gone on to bigger and grander stages with acclaimed albums such as Puberty 2 and Be the Cowboy. If you're a student of Mitski, this is where it first really clicked.

Also at Kops: more Mitski on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Dead Oceans, a reissue of the 2014 album.