The Interns' 20 Best Albums of 2018

After two concept albums and a string of roles in Hollywood blockbusters, one of music’s fiercest visionaries sheds her alter egos and steps out as herself. Buckle up: Human Monáe wields twice the power of any sci-fi character. In this confessional, far-reaching triumph, she dreams of a world in which love wins (“Pynk\") and women of color have agency (“Django Jane”). Featuring guest appearances from Brian Wilson, Grimes, and Pharrell—and bearing the clear influence of Prince, Monae’s late mentor—*Dirty Computer* is as uncompromising and mighty as it is graceful and fun. “I’m the venom and the antidote,” she wails in “I Like That,” a song about embracing these very contradictions. “Take a different type of girl to keep the whole world afloat.”

*“Excited for you to sit back and experience *Golden Hour* in a whole new, sonically revolutionized way,” Kacey Musgraves tells Apple Music. “You’re going to hear how I wanted you to hear it in my head. Every layer. Every nuance. Surrounding you.”* Since emerging in 2013 as a slyly progressive lyricist, Kacey Musgraves has slipped radical ideas into traditional arrangements palatable enough for Nashville\'s old guard and prudently changed country music\'s narrative. On *Golden Hour*, she continues to broaden the genre\'s horizons by deftly incorporating unfamiliar sounds—Bee Gees-inspired disco flourish (“High Horse”), pulsating drums, and synth-pop shimmer (“Velvet Elvis”)—into songs that could still shine on country radio. Those details are taken to a whole new level in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos. Most endearing, perhaps, is “Oh, What a World,” her free-spirited ode to the magic of humankind that was written in the glow of an acid trip. It’s all so graceful and low-key that even the toughest country purists will find themselves swaying along.

If Robyn has found peace or happiness, you wouldn’t necessarily know it by listening to her first album in eight years. Opener “Missing U” sets the mood, with wistful lines about stopped clocks and empty spaces left behind. Yet it’s somehow one of *Honey*’s more upbeat tracks, with an insistent rhythm and glittery arpeggios that recall the brightest moments of 2010’s *Body Talk*. At its best, Robyn’s music has always straddled the line between club-ready dance and melancholy pop, and her strongest singles to date, “Dancing On My Own” and “Be Mine!,” strike this balance perfectly. But never before have we heard the kind of emotional intensity that possesses *Honey*; in the years leading up to it, Robyn suffered through the 2014 death of longtime collaborator Christian Falk and a breakup with her partner Max Vitali (though they’ve since reunited). A few one-off projects aside, she mostly withdrew from music and public life, so *Honey* is a comeback in more ways than one. Produced with a handful of collaborators, like Kindness’ Adam Bainbridge and Metronomy’s Joseph Mount, the album mostly abandons the disco of \"Missing U,\" opting to pair Robyn’s darker lyrics with more understated, house-influenced textures. She gives in to nostalgia on “Because It’s in the Music” (“They wrote a song about us...Even though it kills me, I still play it anyway”) and gets existential on “Human Being” (“Don’t shut me out, you know we’re the same kind, a dying race”). But for all the urgent and relatable rawness, *Honey* is not all doom and gloom: By the time closer “Ever Again” rolls around, she’s on the upswing, and there’s a glimmer of a possible happy ending. “I swear I’m never gonna be brokenhearted ever again,” she sings, as if to convince herself. “I’m only gonna sing about love ever again.”

It’s no coincidence that the cover photo for Ariana Grande’s fourth album is her first not in black and white. She told Beats 1 host Ebro Darden that *Sweetener* is different because, “It’s the first time I feel more present than ever, and I see colors more.” Her new outlook comes just over a year since the devastating attack at her 2017 Manchester concert that killed 22 people and injured over 500, leaving Grande “permanently affected.” She responded with *Sweetener*, a gorgeous, pastel album about love, happiness, strength, and womanhood. She’s deeply in love, evidenced on the tropical “blazed,” and “R.E.M,” with harmonies described as “rainbow clouds” by Pharrell, who produced over half the album. She exits a toxic relationship in “better off”; “God is a woman” is a feminine, sex-positive anthem that she told Darden is her “favourite thing I’ll probably ever do”. The album closer “get well soon” is a self-care message she wrote immediately following a panic attack. “It\'s about being there for each other and helping each other through scary times and anxiety,” she told Darden. “I wanted to give people a hug, musically.” Sonically, *Sweetener* brings some surprises—sparse rhythms and what she calls “dreamier” harmonies replace many of the huge beats and choruses she’s famous for. She said the album is “more like me as a person. And what I’ve been craving to do.”

Back when he was still one-half of Clipse, Pusha-T dazzled listeners of the Virginia duo\'s mixtape series *We Got It 4 Cheap* by annihilating popular beats of the day. The project\'s sole criticism was that the production was already so good, it could carry anyone. *DAYTONA*, copiloted by hip-hop production genius Kanye West, upends that conceit, with contemporary boom-bap built from luscious soul samples that would swallow a lesser MC. With Pusha at the absolute top of his game, *DAYTONA* is somehow more than the sum of its parts, a fact the rapper acknowledges proudly on “The Games We Play”: “To all of my young n\*\*\*\*s/I am your Ghost and your Rae/This is my Purple Tape.”

It was worth the wait for Colombian-American songstress Kali Uchis’s first full-length. A romantic collage of artists and sounds she’s encountered along the way—Tyler, The Creator and Bootsy Collins on “After the Storm”, and Gorillaz’ Damon Albarn on the surfy “In My Dreams”—the album draws on Latin pop (“Nuestro Planeta”), hypnotic R&B (“Just a Stranger”), and high-flying psych-rock (“Tomorrow,” with production from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker). It’s a sign of Uchis’ artistic vision that she pulled so many creative minds into a single body of work that sounds so distinctly her own.

Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow,” the most chantable song of 2017, introduced the Bronx MC’s lively around-the-way-girl persona to the world. Her debut album, *Invasion of Privacy*, reveals more of Cardi\'s layers, the MC leaning forcefully into her many influences. “I Like It,” featuring Bad Bunny and J Balvin, is a nod to her Afro-Caribbean roots, while “Bickenhead” reimagines Project Pat’s battle-of-the-sexes classic “Chickenhead” as a hustler’s anthem. There are lyrical winks at NYC culture (“Flexing on b\*tches as hard as I can/Eating halal, driving a Lam”), but Cardi also hits on universal moments, like going back and forth with a lover (“Ring”) and reckoning with infidelity (“Thru Your Phone”).

There had always been a burning sense of resistance baked into SOPHIE’s experimental soundscapes, which simultaneously honored and rejected the tropes and rules of mainstream pop. But the Scottish producer’s visionary debut album is an exhilarating escalation—a work that not only exploded expectations around song structure and form but conventional notions of gender, identity, and self, as well. *Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides* is sweeping and defiant, pinballing from glitchy rave cuts (“Ponyboy”) to ethereal pop elegies (“It’s Okay to Cry”) to ambient passages that feel practically spiritual (“Pretending”). Each left turn is an invitation to slip further into SOPHIE’S neon universe. In the hands of any other artist, such dizzying digital distortions would appear to warp reality. Here, though, they clarify it. Every synthetic vocal, slithering synth, zigzagging beat, and gleefully warped sample brings us closer to SOPHIE\'S truth. Some of the project’s headiest questions—those about body, being, and soul—seem to rest on a distant horizon the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to yet. “Immaterial,” a fizzing, maximalist hat-tip to Madonna, moves the goalposts even further, proposing a version of consciousness in which the material world is, in fact, only the beginning.

Travis Scott sent a message to Apple Music about his third album, playfully attributed to Stormi, his infant daughter: “Just BUCKLE UP.” Stormi can’t speak yet, presumably, but the sentiment still rings true for a record named after a closed amusement park in his native Houston. *ASTROWORLD* delivers its twists and turns via some of Scott’s most personal lyrics yet, unexpected musical arrangements, and a diverse guest list. “SICKO MODE” features multiple beat changes and Drake halted midverse, playing like some kind of funhouse trip. Other sideshows include Stevie Wonder playing harmonica, James Blake crooning, The Weeknd emoting, and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker shredding — but the main attraction is still Scott\'s life. On album closer “COFFEE BEAN,” Scott tells an unnamed lover, \"Your family told you I\'m a bad move...plus I\'m already a black dude.\" At 17 tracks, *ASTROWORLD* is like any great theme park: There’s just so much to see.

It\'s not enough that rising Spanish star ROSALÍA ingeniously blends traditional flamenco with contemporary pop on her second album—she also gets a narrative based on medieval literature in there, too. Inspired by *Flamenca*, a 13th century book about a woman imprisoned by her jealous fiancé thought to be the first modern novel, each of the 11 songs on this collaboration with producer El Guincho (Pablo Díaz-Reixa) serves as a “chapter” of a running story about a doomed relationship. ROSALÍA went through the album track by track with Beats 1. **MALAMENTE (Cap. 1 Augurio)** “It’s a premonition—this moment when you know in the beginning of the story how it’s gonna end, but even then you go and do it. I was trying to compose a song everybody could understand, doing experimentation with electronic sound but also connected with my roots and flamenco. It’s combining these worlds.” **QUE NO SALGA LA LUNA (Cap. 2 Boda)** “This song is about commitment and that feeling you get when you get in a relationship with somebody. Sometimes you lose something of yourself in the process. It\'s the dark side of getting engaged—it\'s something beautiful but at the same time, there\'s another part, right?” **PIENSO EN TU MIRÁ (Cap. 3 Celos)** “It’s ‘Thinking About Your Gaze.’ This was a song that started from a sample of Bulgarian voices. I did the bassline on an island in Spain, El Hierro. I was so inspired in this place.” **DE AQUÍ NO SALES (Cap. 4. Disputa)** “It’s the most aggressive part of the record...and one of the most risky. I wanted to use the motorcycles in this song with this crazy rhythm that combines \[chapters\] three and four. Khalid told me he liked the song—I would love to do music with him.” **RENIEGO (Cap. 5. Lamento)** “It’s a traditional melody from flamenco. \[Spanish singer\] Camarón was singing with an orchestra; he created the arrangement. I think it sounds very magical.” **PRESO (Cap. 6 Clausura)** “You can hear Rossy de Palma’s voice—she’s an iconic actress from Spain. You can feel the experience in her voice. It’s heavy, you know?” **BAGDAD (Cap. 7 Liturgia)** “I was very inspired by an erotic club in Barcelona called Bagdad and by ‘Cry Me a River’ by Justin Timberlake. He heard the song and said, ‘Yes, you can use the melody’; I was so excited because he never approves anything.” **DI MI NOMBRE (Cap. 8 Éxtasis)** “It’s a very flamenco vibe, very traditional, \[but\] the structure is very pop. It’s about this connection between two people; the sexual moment. The lyrics—\'Say my name, say my name\'—I\'m such a big fan of Destiny\'s Child. \[It\'s\] paying tribute to all these artists I heard when I was a teenager. ” **NANA (Cap. 9 Concepción)** “This is a traditional flamenco melody used when you have a child you’re trying to make fall asleep. I was very inspired by what James Blake does—the space and the production he uses in his songs. I feel like in 50 years, people in universities will study him.” **MALDICIÓN (Cap. 10 Cordura)** “We’d been working with Pablo on the production and composition for a year and a half, and I didn’t like it enough. Then: This Arthur Russell sample—I think it’s perfect in this moment.” **A NINGÚN HOMBRE (Cap. 11 Poder)** “The last song of the record is the first I composed. Pablo was very excited by it and we saw that we sound good together, so I was like, ‘Let’s do the entire record together.’ It’s about the power of a woman.”

All five projects to come from Kanye West’s summer 2018 creative spurt have appeared to be equal collaborations between West and his G.O.O.D. Music colleagues, but that balance manifests itself most clearly on Harlem singer Teyana Taylor’s *K.T.S.E.*. The project—eight songs, one more than its four predecessors—owes as much to Taylor’s airy melodies as it does to Kanye’s studied production ear; the producer utilizes vocal samples as choruses, as bookends to her verses, and as the backbone of beats. For her part, Taylor is the embodiment of the formidable, around-the-way-girl persona fans have adored since her debut in the late aughts. Addressing a one-time elephant in the room on “A Rose In Harlem,” Taylor sings, “N\*ggas like, ‘You ain’t hot, you ain’t pop/Yet, sup with you and Ye?’” And in *K.T.S.E.*, they have their answer.

Noname releases her highly anticipated debut album, Room 25. The 11-track album was executive produced by fellow Chicago native Phoelix and sees Noname return as a more mature and experienced artist. Room 25 has received early praise from The New York Times, calling her a "Full-Fledged Maverick" in their Critic's Pick review yesterday. Noname also recently opened up in The FADER's Fall Fashion issue about her life since the release of her 2016 mixtape Telefone. Rather than cash in on the hype around her extremely well-received 2016 debut mixtape Telefone, Noname took two years to play shows backed by a full band and refine her craft before releasing her follow up project. Over the last few months anticipation for her new album steadily built with Nonamedropping a stream of hints that its release was approaching. Telefone established Noname as one of the most promising and unique voices in hip hop, and with Room 25 she stakes out her place as one of the best lyricists in the genre and comes into her own as a fully realized artist as she achieves mastery over the style she developed with her first tape. Room 25 arrives a little over two years after Noname released her breakout mixtape Telefone. Upon its release, Telefone received nearly universal acclaim and propelled Noname to become one of the most exciting new voices in music. The intimate mixtape cut through the noise of an oversaturated musical landscape like few other releases have in the last several years. Since the release of Telefone, Noname has built an international presence, successfully touring the world and playing the top festivals. In 2017, she also touched the Saturday Night Live stage alongside collaborator and childhood friend Chance the Rapper to perform a song of his Colouring Book album. The New York Times called her SNL performance "a master class in poise, delivery, and self-assuredness." Noname (AKA Fatimah Warner) grew up in Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on the Southside of Chicago that famously attracted accomplished black artists and intellectuals of all types. Fatimah first discovered her love for wordplay while taking a creative writing class as a sophomore in high school. She became enamored with poetry and spoken word - pouring over Def Poetry Jam clips on YouTube and attending open mics around the city. After impressive appearances as Noname Gypsy on early Chance the Rapper and Mick Jenkins mixtapes, she gained a cult-like following online that helped set the stage for the life-changing release of Telefone. Coinciding with the album's release, Noname is also announcing her Fall tour, beginning next year in Detroit on January 2nd, she will play 19 shows across North America before concluding at Oakland's historic Fox Theater on March 15. Tickets for the tour will go on sale 9/21 at 10:00 AM local time and will be available at nonamehiding.com.

“I wanted to write an album that could give justice to being someone complex in the pop world,” the surging French star sometimes known as Héloïse Letissier tells Apple Music. “Pop music is so much recently about trying to simplify narratives, and I was trying to complexify mine. Christine is really me taking your shirt and talking to you really up close. I just want to make sure you actually meet me.” If you have not yet made his acquaintance, you are about to: his second album under the name Christine and the Queens takes his alter ego a step further with a bolder iteration named Chris. “The first album was born out of the frustration of being an aberration in society, because I was a young queer woman,” says the singer (who announced in August 2022 that he was gendering himself in the masculine). “The second was really born out of the aberration I was becoming, which was a powerful woman—being lustful and horny and sometimes angry, and craving for this will to just own everything a bit more and apologize a bit less.” While the new album, also named *Chris*, undoubtedly works as an exploration of identity and sexuality and power—and as self-aware performance art worthy of touchstones like David Bowie and Laurie Anderson—it is also a supremely danceable collection of synth-pop confections that never gets overwhelmed by its messages. “Doesn’t matter” makes something as heavy as questioning the existence of God feel weightless; “Girlfriend,” featuring LA producer/DJ Dâm-Funk, likewise aims for both the hips and the head. “I don’t feel like a girlfriend, but I’ll be your lover,” he says. “The song is basically me trying to steal a bit from the patriarchy. It’s purely empowering out of defiance and wittiness.” That flair for the dramatic comes naturally to this artist. “I wanted to be a stage director before I became a pop performer, and writing a record is kind of like staging a huge play in my head,” he says. “This is a mysterious job I have.”

Some couples repair rifts in their relationships with expensive therapy. Beyoncé and JAY-Z tour stadiums together and surprise-release collaborative albums that mine their self-mythologized personal drama for big-ticket entertainment. Sonically closer to Beyoncé’s 2016 high-art airing of dirty laundry *Lemonade* than Jay’s 2017 response *4:44*, this isn’t just rubbernecking at the doings inside America’s royal family—it’s a challenging, tense, and thoroughly catchy summertime romp in its own right. When Beyoncé sings, “I can’t believe we made it,” in the appropriately aggressive “APES\*\*T,” she might be referring to the détente in their high-profile marriage; she might mean this very album. The fun is in decoding—but it’s hardly the only fun.

“I’m making pop records,” The 1975 frontman Matty Healy told Beats 1 host Matt Wilkinson. “When I say we’re a pop band, what I’m really saying is we’re not a rock band. Please stop calling us a rock band—’cause I think that’s the only music we *don’t* make.” It’s a fair comment: Thanks to their eclecticism and adventure, attempting to label The 1975 has been as easy as serving tea in a sieve. On their third album, the Cheshire four-piece are, once again, many things, including jazz crooners, 2-step experimentalists and yearning balladeers. What’s most impressive is their ability to wrangle all these ideas into coherent music—their outsize ambition never makes the songs feel cluttered. “I hate prog, I hate double albums, I hate indulgence,” said Healy. “I hate it when the world goes, ‘Hey, you’ve got our attention!’ and someone goes, ‘Right, well, if I’ve got your attention, how many guitar solos…’” Crucially, Healy’s lyrics add extra substance to—and bind together—the kaleidoscope of styles. On the neo-jazz of “Sincerity Is Scary,” he rails against a modern aversion to emotional expression. Broadly an album about love in the digital age, *A Brief Inquiry…* offers compelling insights into Healy’s own life. “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)” provides an unvarnished account of his heroin addiction, while “Surrounded By Heads and Bodies” draws on his experiences in rehab and “Be My Mistake” examines guilt and compulsion. “Honestly, you can look at your work and be like, ‘What did I do there that someone likes?’” he said. “Me, when I’m, like, really personal or really inward, really honest, that’s when I get the best reaction.” Introspection needn’t breed a somber mood though. From the tropical pop of “Tootimetootimetootime” to the spry electro-indie of “Give Yourself a Try,” this is an album full of uplifting, melodic rushes. “My favorite records are about life,” said Healy. “It may be a bit of a big thing to say, but I like the all-encompassing aspect of life: You can have these bits, the sad bits, but don’t leave the dancing out, you know what I mean?”

“My natural go-to is sad songs”, Troye Sivan tells Apple Music. But the South African-born, Australian-raised, LA-residing pop star found himself with a problem when he started work on his second album. “I’d go into the studio and think, ‘What am I sad about?’ And it just wasn’t there. So I started writing these lighter, happier songs.” That has manifested as *Bloom*, a warm, upbeat record about love, sex, relationships, and self-discovery. “My My My!,” “Bloom,” and “Dance to This (feat. Ariana Grande)” are ecstatic, innuendo-laden dance-pop hits that glow with the brightness of flourishing love. Even the more solemn songs about difficult moments and breaking up are wise and wistful, rather than melancholy. On “The Good Side,” he gently sings to his ex-boyfriend over an acoustic guitar: “I sympathize, and I recognize/And baby, I apologize/That I got the good side of things.” *Bloom* is, above all else, an ode to the joys of nascent maturity. “I’m out of the teen angst now,” he says. “I’m 23 and I feel a little bit more that I know who I am. I’m super in love. I wanted to immortalize that, as much for myself as anyone else.” Beyond the album’s more dynamic sound—which he says he designed for “hopping around the stage”—what really makes *Bloom* so special is the intimacy behind it all. “Music has always been extremely personal and extremely cathartic and therapeutic,” says Sivan, citing Amy Winehouse as an example of using specificity to make songs more relatable. “That’s the most powerful way to speak to an audience: to just be real with them.”

Finding your identity as a young person is hard; when you’re gay and growing up in the public eye, it becomes even more complicated. Ryan Beatty, the 22-year-old BROCKHAMPTON collaborator (“BLEACH”) and R&B singer *Billboard* once called “Justin Bieber 2.0,” has crafted a debut full-length that’s part diary, part therapy session. “What’s gonna be my reputation?” he ponders over a Calvin Valentine beat on lead single “Camo,” before deciding to “keep my feelings hidden.” In “Bruise,” he feels guilty for ditching his female prom date to make out with a guy in the bathroom. The only consolation he finds is in the arms of a lover: “My love is my religion,” he declares in “God in Jeans,” proclaiming, “If I’m going to hell, I’m taking you with me.”

Lily Allen has always been one of pop’s most absorbingly forthright stars. But the singer herself now criticizes her third album, 2014’s *Sheezus*, for lacking that honesty, telling Vulture.com that she was “writing music for people’s expectations rather than for me.” Follow-up *No Shame* redresses the balance by reflecting on her recently revealed divorce, parenthood, and the celebrity lifestyle with startling candour. Cloaked in dancehall-mottled pop and emotive balladry, her lyrics remain pin-sharp, evoking the scrutiny and isolation of fame: “If you go on record, saying that you know me/Then why am I so lonely?/’Cause nobody f\*cking phones me” (“Come On Then”). Lily’s clearly experienced difficult times, but they’ve helped inspire her most revealing album yet—and she still finds galvanizing energy in new love (“Pushing Up Daisies”) and the fight against the patriarchy (“Cake”).

In an interview with the BBC in 2018, Iggy Pop called Mitski “probably the most advanced American songwriter that I know”—a rave that briefly tempted the Japan-born, New York-based singer to call it a career. “I thought maybe it would be best to quit music now that I’d gotten to the whole point of it, which is to be known by your personal saints,” Mitski tells Apple Music. “Very unfortunately, I can’t seem to quit music.” But even with a widening chorus of cosigns—and a recent stint opening for Lorde in stadiums and arenas—Mitski revels in solitude on her fifth album. The 14 tracks feature precise thoughts on loneliness and self-discovery, encased in ambient textures (“Blue Light,” “Come into the Water,” “A Horse Named Cold Air”) and tempos that range from dance music (“Nobody”) to pensive balladry (“Two Slow Dancers”). On the latter—one of her favorites on the album—she put old anxieties to rest. “For once, I didn’t let my deep-seated fear of losing someone’s attention interfere with doing what I felt was best for a song,” Mitski explains, “which was to make it slow, long, and minimal.” “Washing Machine Heart” uses the metaphor of laundering a partner’s soiled kicks for sonic and lyrical inspiration. “I imagined that’s the sound of someone’s heart going wild,” she explains, “and I thought about what would create that painful sort of exhilaration.” From the dejected sigh that opens “Me and My Husband,” an unflinching peek into relationship doldrums and suburban ennui, to the alone-on-Christmas levels of “Nobody” that Morrissey himself would eat a bacon sandwich to reach, Mitski knows her album is a mood: “I guess I\'m just incredibly tapped into that specific human condition.”

Mitski Miyawaki has always been wary of being turned a symbol, knowing we’re quick to put women on pedestals and even quicker to knock them down. Nonetheless, after the breakout success of 2016’s 'Puberty 2', she was hailed as the new vanguard of indie rock, the one who would save the genre from the white dudes who’ve historically dominated it. Her carefully crafted songs have often been portrayed as emotionally raw, overflowing confessionals from a fevered chosen girl, but in her fifth album, 'Be The Cowboy', Mitski introduces a persona who has been teased but never so fully present until now—a woman in control. “It’s not like it just pours out,” she says about her songwriting, “it’s not like I’m a vessel. For this new record, I experimented in narrative and fiction.” Though she hesitates to go so far as to say she created full-on characters, she reveals she had in mind “a very controlled icy repressed woman who is starting to unravel. Because women have so little power and showing emotion is seen as weakness, this ‘character’ clings to any amount of control she can get. Still, there is something very primordial in her that is trying to find a way to get out.” Since 'Puberty 2' was released to widespread acclaim, ultimately being named one of the best albums of 2016 by Rolling Stone, TIME, Pitchfork, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, NPR, and SPIN, Mitski has been touring nonstop. She’s circled the globe as the headliner, as well as opening for The Pixies, and most recently, Lorde. The less glamorous, often overlooked aspect of being a rising star is the sheer amount of work that goes into it. “I had been on the road for a long time, which is so isolating, and had to run my own business at the same time,” Mitski explains, “a lot of this record was me not having any feelings, being completely spent but then trying to rally myself and wake up and get back to Mitski. I was feeling really nihilistic and trying to make pop songs.” We want our artists to be strong but we also expect them to be vulnerable. Rather than avoiding this dilemma, Mitski addresses directly the power that comes from appearing impenetrable and loneliness that follows. In 'Be The Cowboy', Mitski delves into the loneliness of being a symbol and the loneliness of being someone, and how it can feel so much like being no one. The opening song, “Geyser,” introduces us to a woman who can no longer hold it in. She’s about to burst, unleashing a torrent of desire and passion that has been building up inside. While recording the album with her long-time producer Patrick Hyland - “little by little in multiple studios between tours” - the pair kept returning to “the image of someone alone on a stage, singing solo with a single spotlight trained on them in an otherwise dark room. For most of the tracks, we didn’t layer the vocals with doubles or harmonies, to achieve that campy ‘person singing alone on stage’ atmosphere. We also made the music swell louder than the main vocals and left in vocal errors like when my voice breaks in “Nobody,” right when the band goes quiet, all for a similar effect.” Not a departure so much as an evolution forward from previous albums, Mitski was careful this time to not include much distorted guitar because “that became something people recognized me for, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t repeat myself or unintentionally create a signature sound.” The title of the album “is a kind of joke,” Mitski says. “There was this artist I really loved who used to have such a cowboy swagger. They were so electric live. With a lot of the romantic infatuations I’ve had, when I look back, I wonder, Did I want them or did I want to be them? Did I love them or did I want to absorb whatever power they had? I decided I could just be my own cowboy.” There is plenty of buoyant swagger to the album, but just as much interrogation into self-mythology. The music swerves from the cheerful to the plaintive. Mournful piano ballads lead into deceptively up-tempo songs like “Nobody” where our cowboy admits, “I know no one will save me/ I just need someone to kiss”. The self-abasement of desire is strewn across these 14 songs as our heroine seeks out old lovers for secret trysts that end in disappointment, and cannot help but indulge in the masochistic pleasure of blowing up the stability of long-term partnership. In “A Pearl” Mitski sings of how intoxicating it is to hold onto pain. “I wrote so many songs about being in love and being hurt by love. You think your life is horrible when you’re heartbroken, but when you no longer have love or heartbreak in your life, you think, wasn’t it nice when things still hurt? There’s a nostalgia for blind love, a wonderful heady kind of love.” Infused with a pink glow and mysterious blue light, the performer in Be The Cowboy makes a pact with her audience that the show must go on, but as we draw nearer to the end, a charming ditty recedes into ghostly, faded melancholia, as an angelic voice breaks through to make direct communication. “Two Slow Dancers” closes out the album in a school gymnasium, though we’re no longer in the territory of adolescence. Instead, we’re projected into the future where a pair of old lovers reunite. “They used have something together that is no longer there and they’re trying to relive it in a dance, knowing that they’ll have to go home and go back to their lives.” It’s funny how only the very old and the very young are permitted to indulge openly in dreams, encouraged to reflect and dwell in poetry. In making an record that is about growing old while Mitski herself is still young, a soft truth emerges: sometimes we feel oldest when we are still young and sometimes who we were when we were young never goes away, leaving behind a glowing pearl that we roll around endlessly in the dark. --Jenny Zhang