Mitsuki Miyawaki (born September 27, 1990 in Mie Prefecture, Japan), known mononymously as Mitski, is a Japanese-American singer-songwriter based in the United States.

Born to an American father and a Japanese mother, Mitski first imagined a future in film after enrolling at Manhattan’s Hunter College, but music pulled her elsewhere. Transferring to SUNY Purchase’s Conservatory of Music, she studied studio composition and met her longtime collaborator and producer, Patrick Hyland.

While still a student at Purchase, Mitski recorded and self-released her first two albums; Lush, on January 31, 2012, serving as her junior-year project, and her senior-year project, Retired from Sad, New Career in Business in 2013, a full visual album arranged with the help of a 60-piece student orchestra, each song paired with its own music video.

After graduating, Mitski briefly fronted the experimental prog-metal band Voice Coils before returning to her own work. Her third album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, released on November 11, 2014, and with it came a radical shift from the orchestral sound of her first two albums.

In December of 2015, Mitski signed to Dead Oceans. Her fourth album, Puberty 2, was released on June 17th, 2016, recorded over two weeks at Acme Studios in Westchester County, New York, and receiving widespread acclaim from music critics.

2018 saw the arrival of Be the Cowboy, a meticulously sculpted art-pop album. Years after release, its single “Nobody” unexpectedly exploded on TikTok, sending Mitski back onto the charts.

However, in September of 2019, at the final show of her Be the Cowboy tour, Mitski announced that it would be her last indefinitely, planning to quit music completely and “find another life”. Despite this, by early 2020, Mitski had changed her mind and decided to return to music, realising that music, as painful as it could be, was inseparable from who she was:

What it came down to was, ‘I have to do this even though it hurts me, because I love… This is who I am… I’m going to keep getting hurt, and I’m still going to do it, because this is the only thing I can do.

— Mitski via Rolling Stone

Four years after the release of Be the Cowboy, Mitski’s return came with Laurel Hell on February 4, 2022, becoming the best-selling album in the US during the week of its release and marking her first album to top the US Top Alternative and Rock Albums charts.

On September 15, 2023, Mitski released her seventh studio album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, received with universal praise by critics. The album notably features the single “My Love Mine All Mine”, which became Mitski’s commercial breakthrough and first entry on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #26.