Mitski’s career has consisted of a series of breakthroughs, a word I’m using quite malleably. The first of these breakthroughs happened with the release of her third album, Bury Me At Makeout Creek—her first non-self-released album, and the first that garnered her attention from the somewhat mainstream music press and a spot on the indie rock live session circuit (Autotree, KEXP, Tiny Desk). Her success continued to grow steadily with the release of her fourth studio album, Puberty 2, which both refined and complicated the ideas that drove its predecessor.
It wasn’t until 2018’s Be The Cowboy, though, that her second real breakthrough occurred. Mitski’s synthpop and new-wave turn landed her spots on best-of lists, late night shows, and pop stars’ stadium tours, cementing her as not just the biggest Bandcamp success story but as an artist who just might have a draw outside of the indie world. The question though, was whether that’s what she even wanted.
Her third breakthrough occurred during a two-and-a-half-year period of radio silence. In the back half of 2019, at the then-peak of her fame, Mitski handed over her social media accounts to her management and took an indefinite hiatus from music. A few months later, everything shut down. While her peers and successors in the indie singer-songwriter world were finding their niches through remote livestream performances and front-facing social media promotion, Mitski achieved newfound virality on TikTok, yet it was almost entirely detached from her. But when she returned in 2022 with Laurel Hell, none of its songs made quite as much of a splash as the Be The Cowboy standouts (or even her earlier sleeper hits like “Strawberry Blonde” and “Liquid Smooth”).
However, her 2023 album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, changed everything. Specifically, one song changed everything. For the fourth Mitski breakthrough, look no further than the track “My Love Mine All Mine,” a soft and serene country ballad that gave Mitski her Billboard Hot 100 debut and has soundtracked countless proposal videos, walks down the aisle, first dances, pregnancy announcements, and even a Nara Smith video. Mitski was officially for the masses.
Her latest album, Nothing’s About To Happen to Me is definitely my personal favorite of her post-pandemic output. I’ve seen Mitski live roughly six times and have been a fan of hers for over a decade. I’m fascinated by not just her artistry and capacity for reinvention, but by how singular her career trajectory has been and the way she’s evolved in the public consciousness. I am by no means the authority on Mitski’s discography and narrowing down just 10 songs from her incredibly consistent catalog was so difficult I technically couldn’t even do that (11 and 10 are basically tied). She’s just too good. If you disagree with this ranking, that’s okay. Ask me in a week what my 10 favorite Mitski songs are and I’ll probably disagree with myself too.
10 (tie). “Goodbye My Danish Sweetheart” (Retired from Sad, New Career in Business, 2013)
“Goodbye My Danish Sweetheart” is the first in Mitski’s long tradition of openers that start small and unfurl at a blooming, explosive chorus. It sets a bar that nothing else on her sophomore album quite clears (the Audiotree live version of “Class of 2013” where she swaps her piano for a guitar and wails the final verse just might, but for the sake of this list we’re only considering studio recordings). Retired From Sad, New Career In Business, while an excellent showcase of Mitski’s nascent songwriting talent in its own right, offers little deviation from beautiful-but-straightforward piano ballads. “Goodbye My Danish Sweetheart”—along with its poppier sister “Strawberry Blonde”—feels like seeing the germinating seeds of Mitski’s more fleshed-out experiments in synth-pop to come.
10 (tie). “Texas Reznikoff” (Bury Me at Makeout Creek, 2014)
You want to believe Mitski without question. If she says that Texas is landlocked, you forget the Gulf of Mexico exists. Either that, or trust that her love is strong enough to render geography irrelevant and shut down Sinatra with a simple retort: “But I’ve been anywhere and it’s not what I want / I wanna be still with you.” Mitski’s narrative authority has been there from the beginning, but Bury Me At Makeout Creek is the first record where she seems sure of it—perhaps because it’s the first album she’s recorded post-college, in an actual recording studio, and in the wake of signing to 2010s indie kingmaker Double Double Whammy. The Charles Reznikoff line she quotes at the bridge (“See the trees’ shadows lie in black pools in the lawn”) soars atop a searing riff that sets the tone for the grunge-and-shoegaze-dominated era of her career.
9. “I’m Your Man” (The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, 2023)
35 years after Leonard Cohen swore to howl at his beloved’s beauty “like a dog in heat,” Mitski penned a similarly self-humbling song of the same name. “You’re an angel, I’m a dog,” she sings, “or you’re a dog and I’m your man.” While Cohen was the architect of his love object’s pedestal, Mitski is the one who’s about to fall from a pedestal of her own—it’s not a matter of “if,” but “when.” Mitski’s a master of the love song (or heartbreak song) whose central romantic relationship could also be interpreted as the relationship between Mitski and her music career. By the time Mitski released her seventh album, The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We, she’d grown jaded about fame and fandom—so much so that she’d considered retiring from music altogether. When she dared to speak about it, she was met with derision from the masses who claimed to love her—a kind of love incompatible with human imperfection: “You believe me like a god / I betray you like a man.” The only way out is to jump from the pedestal headfirst.
8. “Working For The Knife” (Laurel Hell, 2022)
Mitski’s rise from indie darling to bonafide superstar happened in her absence. She took an indefinite hiatus from music right before the pandemic hit and everything shut down. Her songs of loneliness resonated with a generation of listeners coming of age in isolation, seeking connection through their screens. Songs like “Nobody” and “Washing Machine Heart” soundtracked endless self-documentation in lieu of in-person socializing. When Mitski returned, it was with a track that stuck out among her breakout hits from Be The Cowboy and the rest of her comeback album, Laurel Hell. While this era of Mitski is mainly characterized by glossy, ’80s-inflected dance-pop, “Working For The Knife” is an industrial ballad better suited to Mitski’s signature Butoh-inspired movement pieces than any TikTok dance. There’s no real rise and fall, no verse-chorus-verse structure—just a slow, compulsive march toward something that she might never get (and might not even want if she does manage to get it) but she’ll see where it takes her anyway.
7. “Where’s My Phone?” (Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, 2026)
The lead single off Mitski’s eighth and most recent album Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, feels like the best of each of her quote-unquote “eras” (here, “era” is not shorthand for “album cycle” but for aesthetically and sonically segmented periods of her career): the art school black box theatrics of Lush and Retired From Sad; guitar fuzz laid on almost as thick as it was during the Makeout Creek and Puberty 2 days; the heartbroken danceability of Be The Cowboy and Laurel Hell; and The Land Is Inhospitable’s outlaw country rollicking. “Where did I go?” she wonders, getting drowned out by a chorus of background vocalists and brain-fogging distortion. It’s a fitting centerpiece for an album that loosely follows one woman’s isolation from public life and descent into solitary madness; alone, she takes apart pieces of her past selves in search of a coherent reflection of her present only to end up more lost than she was before.
6. “Happy” (Puberty 2, 2016)
If you couldn’t tell by this point, I’m partial to Mitski’s album openers, and the one from Puberty 2 embodies the record’s wild swings between ecstasy and despair—the highs are as destructive as the lows (as she puts it on one of this list’s many, many honorable mentions, “Not happy or sad, just up or down / And always bad”). Anything short of extreme is discarded, as is indicated before Mitski even begins singing—the relentless pummel of a drum machine is the first sound we hear on Puberty 2. Mitski’s voice comes in eerily serene and accompanied by a mournful drone, kicking off the funkiest dirge you’ve ever heard to grieve a love that’s not yet lost. “When you go take this heart,” she sings, joyously detached. “I’ll make no more use of it when there’s no more you.”
5. “Fireworks” (Puberty 2, 2016)
I was going to begin this entry by saying that I got into Mitski during a time in my life when I was severely depressed, but on second thought that felt redundant—you’d be hard-pressed to find a Mitski fan who was not severely depressed when they first got into her music. And on third thought, I realized that my second thought was reductive and only contributing to the pigeonholing of Mitski and other (usually female) musicians known to write about heavier emotional experiences, only to have their complex songwriting flattened into the “sad girl” descriptor. But I digress. From its title, you’d think “Fireworks” would be about triumphing over sadness and that its recovery would be framed as a clear-cut victory. But the titular explosions are just background noise to a gradual and nonlinear upward climb towards something resembling a functional, occasionally happy life. Maybe there’s also something to celebrate about sadness not disappearing entirely, but merely smoldering in the background.
4. “Francis Forever” (Bury Me at Makeout Creek, 2014)
For all of Mitski’s layered lyricism, some of her greatest songs are the ones in which she’s the most plainspoken. Its directness is agonizing from the very first verse (which rides in on one of the best basslines in Mitski’s entire catalog): “I don’t know what to do without you / I don’t know where to put my hands / I’ve been trying to lay my head down / But I’m writing this at 3 AM.” The payoff of Mitski ending the second verse by wailing, “I miss you more than anything!” has to be earned. In this case, it’s the sentiment that’s hung over the entire song, the thing that feels too obvious to say out loud until there’s nothing else to say.
3. “Geyser” (Be the Cowboy, 2018)
As I alluded to earlier, Mitski’s greatest love songs are the ones that are directed toward music itself as much as they are any person (if not more so). “Geyser” is, perhaps, the most straightforward example, its haunting organ chords soundtracking a till-death-do-us-part pledge to a love that is unstable and irrational and punishes more than it rewards. When a moment of buzzy static all but censors the song’s first use of the first-person pronoun, you get the sense that it’s a love Mitski’s inclined to lose herself to, one that demands endless self-sacrifice. Still, she finds a way to make it sound like the greatest love story ever told. In an essay that came out the same year as Be The Cowboy, titled “Centrifugal Force,” Mitski wrote, “Right when I think music and I are through, it gives me that perfect show, those perfect 30 minutes of a good performance, or even just three minutes of total contentment as I write the song that works.” Two-and-a-half of those minutes make up “Geyser.”
2. “Townie” (Bury Me at Makeout Creek, 2014)
Like many great pop cultural, subcultural, and countercultural loves that started in my adolescence and have stuck with me well into adulthood, my love of Mitski’s music can be traced back to Rookie Mag. As soon as I clicked ‘play’ on the music video for “Townie,” I was hooked by the zap of guitar feedback, heart-pounding kick drum, and lyrics about righteous teenage rebellion (the Glossier Cloud Paint hues of the accompanying animation were a nice touch as well; this video is one of the first things that comes to mind when I hear the words “millennial pink”). I loved the physicality (and brutality) of the language Mitski gave to her desire—“I want a love that falls as fast as a body from the balcony.” I never knew how to want anything in moderation, or how to want something in a way that didn’t contradict or jeopardize something else I wanted, but “Townie” sounded big and bold enough to hold all of it.
1. “Your Best American Girl” (Puberty 2, 2016)
This is a love song. When “Your Best American Girl” first came out, that aspect of it tended to get glossed over in favor of a grabbier narrative—this was Mitski reclaiming the sounds of grungy, fuzzy indie rock as a means of clapping back at the White Guy Indie Rock Establishment (the assertion that she’s “reclaiming” anything only reinforces the idea that this kind of music is the domain of white men, that it was never Mitski’s music to make in the first place, and that someone who isn’t white or a man shredding on the guitar is some novelty).
Inspired in part by Mitski’s struggle to find a place for herself as an Asian American woman who spent her childhood living all over the world, never staying anywhere long enough to put down roots anywhere, “Your Best American Girl” is a love song about what happens when love isn’t enough. When you cannot love your way into belonging, into acceptance, into being seen instead of just looked at. Like all of Mitski’s best songs, it’s about wanting something despite knowing deep down you’ll never get it, at least not in the way you want to. Sometimes, this means choosing something else that feels equally unattainable. “You’re the one, you’re all I’ve ever wanted / I think I’ll regret this,” Mitski sings, right before the greatest 30 seconds of guitar music of the last decade. Coincidentally, I’m writing this just days before the song turns ten years old. I’m well aware that I’m showing my age (or at least my age in Mitski fan years) by ranking this #1. What was once Mitski’s signature song has now become a retroactive deep cut, characteristic of a musical style she’s since moved on from. To some of us though, she’ll always be the best American girl.
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
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