LOS ANGELES (AP) — Singer-songwriter Mitski’s “My Love Mine All Mine,” plays out like a whispered dirge.

The song is gothic lounge music for a listener who only has about two minutes to have their heart broken — a silky soft slow burn stacked with a choir, organ, bass and most critically, pedal steel guitar, the kind favored by country and western purists.

She is, of course, not the first indie artist to explore weeping Americana sounds. Many of the leading acts in contemporary indie rock pull from the South – like Mitski – or hail from there, like soloists Angel Olsen and Waxahatchee, or groups like Plains, Wednesday and two-thirds of the Grammy-nominated band boygenius. Lucinda Williams ’ “too country for rock ‘n’ roll, too rock ‘n’ roll for country” style is a clear predecessor; and every few generations, it seems like a great new band pulls from alt-country’s narrative specificity.

A WORLD INTERESTED IN COUNTRY

Interestingly, indie rock’s current adoption of country comes at a time of increased global interest in country music. According to the Midyear Music Report for data and analytics platform Luminate, country music experienced its biggest streaming week ever this year, a whopping 2.26 billion.

The genre has historically been enjoyed by English-speaking Americans, but their reporting shows growth in non-Anglophonic territories such as Philippines, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and Vietnam.

In March 2023, Spotify launched a new playlist dedicated to the phenomenon of country-influence in indie rock titled “Indie Twang.” It’s curated by Carla Turi, Spotify’s folk and acoustic music editor, who says the playlist was the result of conversations dating back to summer 2022, when they noticed growing “country influence in indie rock,” as she calls it. It’s a legacy that extends to the late 2010s when country iconography started cropping up in spaces not-traditionally considered country: everything from Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” to Mitski’s 2018 album “Be the Cowboy.”