Around the thirtieth time Mitski cries out to “nobody, nobody, nobody” on her latest single, “Nobody,” the word begins to dissolve at the edges into a spectral echo, as if somebody has slipped so far from her imagination that its shape is decaying. “Nobody,” from her upcoming album Be the Cowboy, is Mitski gone disco, and she uses this shining opportunity to sing a love song to the void. The “planet of love” has been “destroyed by global warming,” Mitski sings, and so she won’t be going there.

Despite the melancholy piano chords and simmering four-on-the-floor beat, Mitski embodies her album title: She sounds like a wallflower joining the aching, lonesome tradition of sad cowboys like Hank Williams. Her lyrics are raw and essential, the same mix of vulnerability and strength that made songs like 2014’s “I Don’t Smoke” feel like emotional armor, and instantly classic. She stares out at the world from her solitary perch, daydreaming her aloneness into Technicolor. “I don’t want your pity,” she demurs. “I just want somebody near me.”

“Nobody” feels like a disarming glance into Mitski’s diary, though she is too wise for wallowing: “I know no one will save me,” she sings, a beam of self-assurance. Mitski wants “one good movie kiss,” but in the process she creates a more relatable idea: The lonely movies of people getting by on their own, replete with a consoling beat to dance to. (Mitski stars in her own, hairbrush microphone in hand, in the fantastically odd “Nobody” video.) Of course, as Mitski dedicates this lovely disco ballad to “nobody, nobody,” she conjures a feeling to which anyone can relate.