I did not originate this theory — I saw it on Reddit, I think, though I can’t say that for sure as I haven’t been able to recover the post — but I’ll share it here anyway: Mitski’s career can be cleanly divided into two-album eras. There’s “Embryonic Mitski” (2012’s Lush and 2013’s Retired From Sad, New Career In Business), “Indie Rock Mitski” (2014’s Bury Me At Makeout Creek and 2016’s Puberty 2), “Disco-Rock Mitski” (2018’s Be The Cowboy and 2022’s Laurel Hell), and “Country Noir Mitski” (the two most recent records, including the upcoming Nothing’s About To Happen To Me, out Friday).
On 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We, she remade herself in the unlikely guise of an after-hours dive-bar siren, singing gorgeously torch-y songs about buffalo, insects, and the apocalypse against a phalanx of pedal steel guitar licks and “Lay Lady Lay”-style moseyin’-pony rhythms. And she revives that sound on Nothing’s About To Happen To Me, with occasional callbacks to “Indie Rock Mitski” (the rollicking single “Where’s My Phone?”), the period that marked her original flush of prominence that now feels like a transitional period on the way to her current status as The Queen Of Music Cool Middle-Schoolers Love.
It’s also another strong entry in an almost perfect catalog, where each progression has felt surprising in the moment and solidly logical in retrospect. Her themes remain constant — the desperation of longing, the desperation of being Mitski, the desperation of longing to be Mitski. But Nothing’s About To Happen To Me also indicates her seemingly tireless ability to package her singular point of view (and the self-obsessed world it represents) in ways that are consistently fresh and interesting. In the world of contemporary indie — Mitski at this point has reached “elder legacy” status — she must be counted among the most reliable brands going.
But how did it happen? Let’s use a handy narrative vehicle that remains popular among casual readers on the internet to explore a really fascinating career. Here are my top 20 favorite Mitski songs! (Excluding songs from the new album, it’s too early to include them!)
20. “Drunk Walk Home” (2014)
Musicians typically establish an audience early on and then take those listeners with them as they age and evolve. But then there are artists who enter the rarefied “elder legacy” cohort, where they gather many different audiences over time. Sometimes these audiences overlap, but often, they don’t. In the indie world, these audience frequently fall along generational lines. Pavement has the O.G. hipsters from the 1990s, and they also have kids who grew up believing that “Harness Your Hopes” was their most iconic song. The National has a strong core of “sad dads” who seek the catharsis of a live “Mr. November,” and also a more recent crew that became wise after Aaron Dessner started writing songs with Taylor Swift.
For Mitski, the multi-generational strata of her following were made plain by Mitski: The Land, her recent concert film culled from three Atlanta shows shot in 2024. Ostensibly a career-spanning set, it didn’t include “Your Best American Girl,” the most famous song from her “early” period. An unforgivable oversight, perhaps, for her original audience, though not so much for the teenagers who came on board post-Be The Cowboy. Writing as one of the older Mitski “originalists,” however, I must open this list with a track from Bury Me At Makeout Creek, the album that broke her as an “indie famous” star while setting a noisy musical palate removed from much of what she did before or after.
19. “First Love/Late Spring” (2014)
While Mitski’s sound as changed over time, a crucial musical through-line is her aloof yet cooly emotional vocal delivery. Her unique trick as a singer is the ability to keep her voice relatively flat, even deadpan, while the surrounding music barrels through various soaring peaks and harrowing valleys. This compositional approach recurs throughout her catalog, even as the specific instrumentation changes. It’s certainly there in “First Love/Late Spring,” a berserker emo-rocker from Bury Me about romantic reluctance (“Please don’t say you love me”) where Mitski’s affectless voice is the calm at the center of a psychosexual storm.
18. “Dan The Dancer” (2016)
Picking up on the aforementioned “theory of two” regarding Mitski albums: “Dan The Dancer” comes from Puberty 2, aka the back half of the “Indie Rock Mitski” era. And, in accordance with all her “back half” records (aka “the even-numbered ones”), it represents a scaling-up from the predecessor, typified by the sharpness and extra muscle applied to this brief but potent synth-rock gem.
17. “Class Of 2013” (2013)
Puberty 2 is where I officially came on board as a Mitski fan, which prompted me to go back to the “Embryonic Mitski” period. This remains the era I am admittedly the least well-versed in, a reflection of the first two records (both self-released) essentially being rough drafts for the more fully formed “Indie Rock Mitski” era on the horizon. Though this also points to what makes those albums so fascinating when taking in her catalog. You can hear her working out styles and tropes that will eventually become Mitski signatures. In “Class Of 2013,” for example, her knack for economical songwriting is already apparent, as she wrests a statement about generational ennui from a scant 109-second sketch about living at home with the parents, post-graduation:
“Mom, I’m tired
Can I sleep in your house tonight?
Mom, is it alright
If I stay for a year or two?
Mom, I’ll be quiet
It would be just to sleep at night
And I’ll leave once I figure out
How to pay for my own life, too.”
16. “Two Slow Dancers” (2018)
Several albums later, on the epochal Be The Cowboy, she reaches for another school-related metaphor, this time describing the scent of a gymnasium (“It’s funny how they’re all the same / It’s funny how you always remember”) to convey the over-familiar dynamic of a couple in the process of breaking apart. Also like “Class Of 2013,” this song closes the record, establishing a tradition of melodramatic Mitski album climaxes that pack overpowering wallops inside quietly intense packages.
15. “I Don’t Like My Mind” (2023)
The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We, along with Be The Cowboy, represent my own personal era of “Peak Mitski.” Be The Cowboy will likely forever be the best entry point for newcomers, presenting her music as a series of infectiously poppy packages with gooey, eccentric, and occasionally poisoned centers. The Land Is Inhospitable, meanwhile, is her retreat into Mitski World, “a pocket symphony of soft-focus Americana,” as I put it in my review.
To put it less wordily: It’s darn pretty! And few tracks from the record are as “darn pretty” as this one.
14. “My Love Mine All Mine” (2023)
Recorded with cast of country-music session stars, The Land Is Inhospitable upon early listens seemed like the opposite of a “sustain your pop stardom” record. Pop stardom had, indeed, become a legitimate concern for Mitski upon the release of Laurel Hell and the corresponding support dates with Harry Styles in various stadiums around the world. A Nashville Skyline for zoomers, it was her retreat from mass culture into a own cozy shell of pedal steel-powered reverie. Surprisingly, however, The Land Is Inhospitable wound up spawning her most streamed song. Currently flirting with 1.9 billion streams on Spotify as I type this — it might hit two billion by the time this publishes — “My Love Mine All Mine” is a romantic ballad directed at the moon, much like a Dylan song from a different country “retreat” record. Could my “baby here on Earth” be the same baby from “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”? In my mind, at least: Yes, absolutely.
13. “A Horse Named Cold Air” (2018)
“My Love Mine All Mine” signals a weird bug in Mitski’s ascent: As her music has gotten “older”-sounding, her fans have grown younger. I don’t think there is an artist at her level who is less engaged with whatever is currently “happening” in popular music, and this has not seemed to affect her standing with the typical “hipper than average” middle-school kid in the slightest. This is, career-wise, her greatest achievement. She is now the kind of star who takes a moment during every show to thank parents for accompanying their kids (as seen in Mitski: The Land), while at the same time making music that derives from those parents’ (or even grandparents’) record collections. Though it’s possible I’m underselling the “old soul” aspect of her songwriting and performing persona that existed well before she became a coming-of-age staple. The oddly touching “A Horse Named Cold Air,” for instance, signifies this side of Mitski, utilizing an allusion to horse racing — a sport that peaked in America when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president — to illustrate the vagaries of suddenly feeling very ancient and used-up, a feeling that’s endemic even among the very young from time to time.
12. “A Pearl” (2018)
Part of what makes Be The Cowboy such a no-brainer Mitski “starter” record is how it feels at times like the best-possible compendium of her various guises. While she largely abandoned meat-and-potatoes, guitar-centric indie after Puberty 2, she slips back into that style effortlessly on “A Pearl,” proving that she could have reigned as the queen of 21st century emo if she were so inclined (and considerably less ambitious).
11. “Why Don’t You Stop Me” (2018)
The only Mitski album I don’t like is Laurel Hell, for reasons I have written about at length and won’t rehash at length here. (There are no Laurel Hell songs on this list, which feels like a definitive statement vis a vis my feelings on the matter.) However, just for the sake of context, here’s the most essential graf from my original review: “Mitski has said that Laurel Hell went through many iterations — including country and punk versions — before she decided that “I need to dance,” according to Rolling Stone. But the throwback 1980s sheen applied to the songs is ultimately noncommittal. The central conflict here seems to be this: Is this a full-blown bid for pop superstardom? Or is it a subversive spin on the idea of a pop record akin to Mitski’s other work? I can’t tell as a listener, and I’m not sure Mitski knows, either. She’s trying to have it both ways — simultaneously stepping up and retreating — and succeeding at neither.”
I stand by that 100 percent. And I think the veracity of the statement bears out when you listen to the albums on either side of Laurel Hell. The one after, The Land Is Inhospitable, is the opposite of “noncommittal” and just a much deeper and more rewarding listen. Be The Cowboy, meanwhile, is overloaded with the sort of pop bangers that Laurel Hell routinely fails to deliver, including this tone setter that positions relentlessly slashing guitars and spritely synths against an undeniable Giorgio Moroder-inspired electronic gurgle.
10. “The Frost” (2023)
Here we have the opposite of an undeniable Giorgio Moroder-inspired electronic gurgle. The pivot from Laurel Hell to The Land Is Inhospitable is the most dramatic in Mitski’s catalog, though it didn’t necessarily signal a shift away from pop bangers. She just squared her focus on a different kind of pop banger, the sort that would have been a hit in 1966 if it were beamed to the radio by aliens from the future. “The Frost” is precisely that kind of song. This creepy soft-rock ballad, I wrote in my original review, “reimagines the apocalypse as a not-so-bad opportunity to experience some solitude, like a bizarro-world Twilight Zone episode where the twist is that the climatic tragedy is secretly a happy ending.”
9. “I’m Your Man” (2023)
Leonard Cohen famously divided his own music into “songs of love and hate.” On The Land Is Inhospitable, Mitski parcels her music into three kinds of songs — “love,”
“lonely,” and “loathsome.” “I’m Your Man” falls into the third category. It’s a tale of female-on-male vengeance served cold — as if there’s any other way — ornamented with the chilling sound of barking dogs. I’m not sure if Mitski deliberately crafted this as an answer record to Cohen’s declarative song of the same name, but imagining it as such adds another rich layer of subtext.
8. “Heaven” (2023)
This, meanwhile, is a defining example from the “love” pile on that album. And, in terms of just straight-up musical beauty, it bests pretty much every tune in her discography. Though one particular line — “As I sip on the rest of the coffee you left / A kiss left of you ” — does make me gag a little. Find someone who loves you as much as Mitski loves drinking her beloved’s backwash.
7. “Washing Machine Heart” (2018)
A fascinating paradox at the heart of many Mitski songs is how, on one hand, she presents herself as an aloof, somewhat unknowable figure — the proverbial riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma — while at the same time singing from the perspective of the romantic (and lovelorn) pursuer. Shouldn’t she be the pursued one in all these songs? As it stands, “Washing Machine Heart” has one of her best come-on lines: “Toss your dirty shoes in my washing machine heart.” Though the thing about washing machines is, like Mitski, they have cycles. Those shoes aren’t destined to stay in her vicinity for long.
6. “I Bet On Losing Dogs” (2016)
Along with “A Horse Called Cold Air,” this belongs in the special Mitski song subcategory known as “Animal Racing As A Metaphor For The Existential Nature Of Being Alive.” In this instance, she’s singing about how life itself is signified by a non-victorious canine — no matter who you are, you know you’re losing, bit by bit and day by day, as death looms on the distant horizon. And yet, in the meantime, we all pay for our place in the ring. “I wanna feel it,” Mitski sings, and then she makes you feel it, that sweet agony of defeat. Though it’s the slow lumber of the music that really conveys the feeling, as Mitski does this very Mitski thing where she merges Enya with Weezer’s “Blue Album” on the chorus, in a way that only makes sense in a Mitski song.
5. “Townie” (2014)
An implicit (and somewhat fraught) takeaway from this list is that Mitski has a complicated relationship with rocking. Clearly, she can rock if she so chooses. But for the most part, she’s opted to not pull that lever. (I liken it to Prince’s relationship with the guitar — he could be as good as anyone in the world when he picked up his ax, but he often chose to play piano instead toward the end of his life.) The “Indie Rock Mitski” era, obviously, was the peak of Mitski generously gracing us with her rocking side, with “Townie” being one of the very best instances of her turning up the guitars and getting her “bubblegum drone” on.
4. “Me And My Husband” (2018)
By Be The Cowboy, she was mostly rocking only in the “yacht rock” sense. As is the case with “Me And My Husband,” where she channels both Fagen/Becker’s Pretzel Logic phase as well as the inner monologue of a suburban wife in the midst of a stream-of-conscious nervous breakdown. “And at least in this lifetime / we’re sticking together,” she sings. Though the controlled mania of the music implies that “this lifetime” might not last much longer, for him and/or for her.
3. “Buffalo Replaced” (2023)
I have many gripes with the term “Americana” — it sounds corny, it’s often associated with corny music, it’s frequently wielded by corny people with corny tastes, etc. But all my complaints could all be consolidated under the gripe about how an album like The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We will never be classified as “Americana” even though it’s one of the best “should be called ‘Americana’ if we’re going to use that term at all” albums of the decade. It is, after all, about America. (And it was even partly made in Nashville, for crying out loud.) “Allusions to nature and history abound, creating the sense that the songs take place in America’s past, present, and future simultaneously,” I wrote in 2023. This is truest of “Buffalo Replaced,” a song that hearkens to The Band’s “It Makes No Difference,” in which Mitski “hears long-dead beasts in the sound of a freight train in a manner similar to the ancient stampeding cattle who rattle modern walls.”
2. “Nobody” (2018)
There are only two songs anyone can credibly claim to be Mitski’s “best.” This is clearly one of them. When it originally emerged as the cornerstone track from Be The Cowboy, arguably the cornerstone album of her career, “Nobody” seemed like it already existed. Surely someone, maybe Laura Nyro or Barbara Streisand (when she was collaborating with Barry Gibb), came up with this lost classic and Mitski merely covered it. Not that she wasn’t capable of writing an all-timer song, just that “Nobody” felt like the sort ecstatic amalgam of Broadway and Studio 54 that must have been performed by Miss Piggy on The Muppet Show in the late ’70s. But it wasn’t. Mitski wrote it. She came up with a modern standard. She nailed it. The song she’ll probably always be known for. Props to her.
1. “Your Best American Girl” (2016)
And yet I’m putting this one above “Nobody” for sentimental reasons. I remain, after all this time, an “Indie Rock Mitski” bro. And this is “Indie Rock Mitski” at its finest. She would go on to write anthems that thousands of screaming fans would scream back to her in arenas. But I have a soft spot for that time in her career when she was writing anthems that should have had thousands of screaming fans screaming back at her. But she wasn’t quite there yet. But as Mitski has proven, time and again, in her career, she always gets where she wants eventually.