Mitski is a connoisseur of surfaces. She knows exactly how to polish them until they are bright, placing the fine bone china on the side tables, making sure all the dinner forks are in order. She also knows how perfectly smooth surfaces betray us, how we can summon an earthquake of emotion to send all the pieces crashing to the floor. This clash—preternatural composure shattered by elemental feeling—is at the heart of her astonishing album Be the Cowboy, and “Nobody” is its jagged peak, a convulsion of despair executed with the neatness of a triple axel.

The song comes out sashaying, with genteel piano voicings and bachelor-pad disco flourishes. But once the words resolve into the foreground, “Nobody” becomes a gasp of loneliness so pure it hurts your lungs to breathe it in; no song broke through the year with the immediacy and desperation of “I’ve been big and small and big and small and big and small again/And still nobody wants me.” It is the sort of bald confession that clears a room, that makes people fear your misfortune to be some kind of contagion. But “Nobody” offers it with jazz hands, and in one final flourish, signs off with the two most dazzling musical modulations of the year. Coming across the song this year was like chancing upon someone’s emotional meltdown on Facebook, marked off by posts about dogs and ads for backpacks—it felt like all the worst and most exhilarating parts of 2018 compressed into a diamond. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Mitski, “Nobody”