Reclaiming Rock

Like many skilled lyricists, the twenty-five-year-old singer-songwriter Mitski doesn’t like her words to be taken too literally. In April, when she released “Your Best American Girl,” her most straightforward indie-rock single to date, some music blogs assumed that the song was a provocation, designed to position Mitski as a female corrective to the predominantly male world of D.I.Y. rock music. “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me / But I do, I think I do,” she sings, not quite defiant. “And you’re an all-American boy / I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl.”