At high noon, in the Wild West of our collective imagination, America began to romanticize the wrong kind of power. The cowboy strolled in—spraying bullets down Main Street, burning saloons to cinders—and his reckless bravado became something to be admired, not scorned. But in a year likewise full of ugly, macho confrontations shot from the hip, Mitski Miyawaki reclaimed the gunslinger’s confidence for herself. Channeling brash new characters on her fifth album, she embraced the opposite of her experiences, and the gambit paid off: This is Mitski’s most triumphant record to date, a refining of her many strengths, splashed across the largest canvas her arms can carry.

Mitski’s familiar charms—scrappy guitars, cutting observations, nervy synths—return as conduits for deeper intimacies and grand declarations. Be the Cowboy finds her ready for the arena, with nimble, airtight songs full of broad pop choruses and big, irrepressible emotions presented as candidly as dry-cleaning receipts. Even in her 10-gallon hat, she fixes her gaze on universal torments: loneliness, devotion, wistfulness, defiance. With “Nobody,” her disco-piano romp of a single, Mitski turns the song’s title into the biggest sing-along of her career, those three syllables locking in all the lint of isolation: the despair, the self-loathing, the cruel and ever-dwindling hope for pardon. In “A Pearl,” she wails and pounds the crumbling walls of a toxic relationship, papering over the pain with power-ballad feedback, her lithe vocals carrying a wisp of forsaken echo.

Mitski sets her credo on “Geyser,” Cowboy’s stunning opener. She weaponizes passionate, tenacious intensity—something women can be shamed for, particularly in non-Western cultures—and celebrates herself for it. In a Broadway belt, she cries of her desire, “Feel it bubbling from below/Hear it call, hear it call,” as wind-whipped guitars crest below. In the past, Mitski has never shown an interest in playing a role, whether that of the submissive Asian-American stereotype or the rebuker of such fetishism. Adopting hotshot narrators on Cowboy becomes even more significant in this context; in doing so, she’s said, she found the inverse of her apologetic experiences as a Japanese-American woman, and the empowerment ripples outward. Her character work is also a rebellion against the “confessional” pejorative foisted onto so many female singer-songwriters, the idea that women must be helplessly spilling these disclosures instead of savvily employing them. All of this makes her defiance even more liberating to hear. It’s good to have Mitski firing back for all of us; it’s even better to hear this true original growing into her limitless future. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Mitski, “Two Slow Dancers”