The new Mitski album, Be The Cowboy, is one of my favorite records of 2018 so far and it’s only been out for a little over two weeks. It exceeded all my expectations I had foolishly set about the record. It succeeds by packing a ton of great moments in as short bursts of prose, spanning 32 minutes over 14 tracks. Most of the songs are essentially choruses or verses – there isn’t much of a complicated structure here. That style fits this album perfectly.

One song that might get buried due to the overwhelmingly strong first half is the penultimate track, “Blue Light”, which comes on strong right out of the gate (“Somebody kiss me, I’m going crazy, I’m walking ’round the house naked”), but slowly strips away into an ethereal, wistful yearning: “Are you that blue light?”. The song ends with Mitski drifting away from reality and structure, cooing “do-do-do” into the ether.

The track is only 1:43 minutes and packs in so much meaning and lore to the universe of this album. I’ve had the latter half of the song stuck in my head for two days straight, pulsing like a deep-space SOS signal.