Mitski Miyawaki ‘13

Mitski, who is opening for Lourde on her 2018 Melodrama world tour, holds a unique place in the indie rock scene—there’s truly no one like her. She wrote her first two albums here at Purchase in the studio composition program. She self-published her first, Lush, in 2012. She collaborated with a 60-person orchestra on her second album, Retired from Sad, New Career in Business. It was her senior project.

After graduating from Purchase in 2013, Mitski Miyawaki (monomonymously known as Mitski) moved to NYC and went on to release her third critically acclaimed album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek (2014), on label Double Double Whammy. Rolling Stone magazine listed her as one of “10 New Artists You Need to Know” in its February 2015 issue.

In 2016, Mitski’s fourth album Puberty 2 appeared on many Best of 2016 lists, including at #3 on Time Magazine’s Top 10 Best Albums, while her song “Your Best American Girl” landed at #2 on NPR’s list of Top 100 songs for 2016.

Brooklyn Magazine writes about the latter, “The first spin through the song proves that Mitski is a rock star. The second listen proves that she is a poet. The third listen shows that she is still learning to join those outsized talents together and carve out a space for herself in a world that hasn’t always accepted her…. Mitski has primed herself to become the kind of rock star we need now: open-hearted, full of questions, experimental, searching, funny, equally messy and wise, and most importantly, armed with pristine riffs that will blow out your speakers.”

A post on Mitski’s Facebook page (@MitskiLeaks) in 2016 announced that she would be performing at Coachella on the same day as headliner Beyoncé, to which a fan pithily replies, “No, Beyoncé is playing on the Mitski day…”

While she’s done so much in so little time, we can’t wait to experience what Mitski has in store for the future.