Indie rock was just a detour for Mitski. On “Be the Cowboy,” her fifth album, she embraces the possibilities of full-scale pop — not to formularize her emotions, but to give them an even larger canvas. It’s exactly the right choice.

Since releasing her 2014 album, “Bury Me at Makeout Creek,” Mitski has built a following the old-fashioned way: touring constantly and wielding her big hot-pink bass guitar, singing about torturously ambivalent relationships and her own evolving identity — as a woman growing up and finding her own path, as an ambitious artist and, in songs like her online hit “Your Best American Girl” from her 2016 album, “Puberty 2,” as a Japanese-American. (Her last name is Miyawaki.) Glancing back at 1990s songwriters like Liz Phair, her songs often surged with distorted guitar: a token of hands-on effort and untamed sound, of here-and-now sincerity.

Yet Mitski was never a primitivist or indie-rock die-hard. The two albums she released before “Makeout Creek,” while she attended the SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music, feature piano-centered chamber pop, with the scrupulously graceful, long-lined melodies and asymmetrical structures that she would also bring to her rock songs.

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Meanwhile, songwriters like Lorde — who has toured arenas with Mitski as an opening act — and, from the artier end of the spectrum, St. Vincent, have made it abundantly clear that pop’s computerized, synthetic tools don’t have to limit self-expression. “Be the Cowboy,” produced by Patrick Hyland and largely played by Mr. Hyland and Mitski, brings on the synthesizers and programmed drums, but it also provides close-ups of Mitski’s voice, setting aside the previous albums’ double-tracking and guitar noise. The trappings have changed, but not the intimacy.