Mitski
Mitski Miyawaki writes confessional, structurally daring indie rock and art pop, funneling classical composition training from Purchase College's Conservatory of Music into songs that lurch between hushed confession and wall-of-noise catharsis. Since her 2014 breakthrough Bury Me at Makeout Creek, she has become one of her generation's most acclaimed songwriters, turning heartbreak, immigrant identity, and self-erasure into widescreen pop-rock miniatures.
Mitski has named Ringo Sheena's Kalk Samen Kuri no Hana her favorite album, praising its density of instrumentation and 'so much attention to detail' — a maximalist, genre-hopping arranging instinct audible in how Mitski stacks and then strips away sound within a single song.
listen forListen to how Ringo Sheena's 'Tsuki ni Makeinu' keeps its verses hushed and acoustic-leaning before the chorus arrives buried in distortion, then put on Mitski's 'Your Best American Girl,' which stages almost the same trick: plainspoken verse, then a chorus that drowns itself in guitar.
Mitski has said that stumbling on a Jeff Buckley CD as a teenager cracked open her sense of what a song could do — that a voice could swing from a hush to a scream inside one verse, and that a pop song could still carry operatic weight.
listen forCue up Buckley's 'Grace' and notice how the band drops out so his voice can hang alone in the room before crashing back in; that same trapdoor dynamic — plain confession detonating into noise — drives Mitski's 'Class of 2013,' where a bare piano vocal gives way to a wash of guitar right at the end.
By Mitski's own account, her listening habits shifted after she discovered Björk (alongside M.I.A. and Ringo Sheena) — an introduction to pop music that treats production itself as an expressive, theatrical instrument rather than a neutral backdrop.
listen forBjörk's 'Hyperballad' builds a whole emotional arc out of layered synths and beats swelling underneath a plainly sung melody; Mitski's 'Nobody' works the same way, riding a disco pulse and synth haze to carry a lyric about isolation that the vocal alone couldn't hold.