How Mitski Became the Unlikeliest of Pop Stars

Eight years ago, if you'd asked me whether I thought Mitski would one day be selling out theaters, I might not believe you. I had just seen the singer-songwriter in a tiny club in Jacksonville. It was just Mitski and a drummer, and she seemed tired of the road and wary of the spotlight. After the third or fourth song, she spoke quietly into the mic, telling the crowd with polite terseness that there would not be an encore.

And yet, she wasn't responding to a hostile audience. On the contrary, the fans assembled were intense in their adoration of the singer, who'd just broken through with her album Puberty 2. The girl standing next to me up front had driven up from Miami just to see the show (Mitski had played at Gramps the night before) and shouted along with Bury Me at Makeout Creek deep cut "Drunk Walk Home."

Mitski has become the kind of artist who attracts this kind of fervent passion, perhaps in part because she seems so ambivalent about it. Profiles of the singer have painted her as an intensely private person who shuns the press and social media, fears her rabid fandom, and harbors intense resentment of the music business, forcing her to sell her most intimate feelings as three-minute pop songs. And yet, she has inadvertently become the patron saint of sad-girl indie, an informal movement that emerged in the mid-2010s of female indie rock and pop musicians making what the New Yorker's Jia Tolentino succinctly described as "sad, buoyant, beautiful songs." Waxahatchee, Jay Som, Japanese Breakfast, Weyes Blood, Soccer Mommy, and the trio that makes up Boygenius — Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker — are all part of this milieu.
But no one epitomizes this pseudo-genre better than Mitski. On The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, her latest, most artistically mature album yet, songs include dramatic, Cormac McCarthy-esque takes on her stardom in "I'm Your Man" ("You believe me like a god/I betray you like a man"), and "When Memories Snow" ("Be back in my room/Writin' speeches in my head/Listenin' to the thousand hands/That clap for me in the dark"). A potent meditation on self-hatred turns into an ode to eating one's feelings ("I Don't Like My Mind"). A fading love is personified as a faraway celestial object ("Star").

Mitski's songs are full of these painful meditations on love, loneliness, inadequacy, and the existential dread that comes with living amid declining living standards, political instability, and climate catastrophe. That makes them atypical as far as pop songs go. Yet they've become a magnet for a generation of young people who are more socially disconnected, depressed, and more likely to identify as queer than ever, dealing with all these issues in spades.

Recorded in Nashville with a symphonic country flavor, the new record also accidentally caught a wave of explosive interest in country music propelled by the likes of Morgan Wallen, Kasey Musgraves, and other artists similarly driven by such old-school songcraft. Her songs are also short — none on the new album pass the four-minute mark — and generally built as traditional verse-chorus-verse pop tunes, inadvertently making them ideal for today's short attention spans.

As a result of these factors, building on years of underground exposure, she's become an unlikely star. Her reputation and her following have grown such that each successive time I see her live, it's always in a bigger room. The first show of her upcoming tour, which launches at the Fillmore Miami Beach, sold out almost instantly; the promoters quickly added a second date only for that show to sell out as well. A recent track, "My Love Mine All Mine," even caught fire on TikTok. In October, it claimed the top spot on Billboard's brand-new chart that tracks songs on the social media app.
Of the sad-girl indie scene, only Boygenius approaches the size of her following, but unlike her, that group has embraced the spectacle of stardom, signing with Capitol Records, dressing up as Nirvana on the cover of Rolling Stone and as the Beatles on Saturday Night Live. Phoebe Bridgers is arguably as famous for the band as she is for tabloid-ready romances. Mitski doesn't do any of that, and she still has more than 36 million monthly Spotify listeners to Boygenius' five million.

Maybe absence does make the heart grow fonder. Or perhaps it's that, even more than her indie-girl colleagues, she has spent years producing work that achieves the perfect balance between the personal and the universal that many songwriters search their whole lives for. Anyone can find moments within her discography that feel as if they're written exclusively for them and their problems, no matter how cringe. That's Mitski's power — to reach into her soul, pull it out, and turn it into a mirror, reflecting the pain, sorrow, loneliness, and melodrama of our own lives back at us, no matter how different we might be from her.

Mitski. With Tamino. 8 p.m., Friday, January 26, and Saturday, January 27, at the Fillmore Miami Beach, 1700 Washington Ave., Miami Beach; 305-673-7300; fillmoremb.com. Sold out.