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. Originally released 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 the late Elliott Smith that folk music and punk rock can easily be expressed as 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 Don Giovanni to Dead Oceans, has since faithfully kept Bury Me At Makeout Creek in print while Ms. Miyawaki has gone on to bigger and grander things and bigger stages on both sides of the Atlantic with acclaimed albums such as Puberty 2 and Laurel Hell. If you're a student of Mitski, this is where it first started to really click.

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