Star

The closing track of Mitski's seventh album finds her at her most expansive. 'Star' arrives near the end of a record that unfolds like a cinematic journey, one built on orchestral swells and country-inflected arrangements. Here, love becomes astronomical: a distant light that has already travelled far, leaving only its afterglow visible from earth. Mitski sings of keeping a leftover light burning so you can keep looking up, transforming absence into a reason to hold on. The song crystallises the album's central idea: that within an inhospitable landscape, love persists not as presence but as memory, as something already gone yet still worth believing in. Her voice moves through tender verses into moments of expansive yearning, the arrangement building beneath her to match the scale of what she's describing. A Dork five-star record, and 'Star' is among its most affecting moments, a final gesture of devotion wrapped in the language of the cosmos.