Mitsuki "Mitski" Miyawaki was already confidently setting herself up as an artist of the David Bowie/P.J. 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, singing solo with a single spotlight trained on them in an otherwise dark room," Be The Cowboy is an interesting hybrid of all things Mitski that preceded it, bringing the solemn piano balladry of her early, self-released student-demo albums back into play while still hanging onto the fuzz-toned guitars that gave 2014's Bury Me At Makeout Creek and 2016's Puberty 2 an edge above and beyond the singer's biting not-so-sad-Sad-Girl lyrics. It's a landmark work, the first Mitski record where she sounds definitively like no one else but Mitski and Mitski alone and it wound up topping numerous year-end "best of" lists, including those of influential online publications Pitchfork, Consequence Of Sound and The Line Of Best Fit. Despite its relatively uncompromising nature, Be The Cowboy also saw Mitski making her first incursion onto the Billboard album charts in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. She had officially "arrived." 

TRACKLISTING:

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. Come Into The Water
9. Nobody
10. Pink in the Night
11. A Horse Named Cold Air
12. Washing Machine Heart
13. Blue Light
14. Two Slow Dancers