Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The Austin Chronicle
Chicago Tribune
NME	6/10
Paste	9.5/10
Pitchfork Media	10/10
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Spin	8/10
The Village Voice	A−

The Lonesome Crowded West is the second studio album by American alternative rock band Modest Mouse. The album was released on Up Records on November 18, 1997, on both compact disc and vinyl LP. The two towers pictured on the album's cover are The Westin Seattle.

The Lonesome Crowded West has been cited as the band's breakthrough album and featured in several publications' lists of the best albums of the 1990s. The album was reissued on CD and vinyl by Isaac Brock's Glacial Pace record label in 2014, along with Modest Mouse's debut album This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About.

Blake Butler of AllMusic praised the album's diversity, noting the range of "quiet, brooding acoustics like 'Bankrupt on Selling' and dark and pounding thrashers like 'Cowboy Dan'", and called the album "indie rock at its very best."

Pitchfork Media ranked The Lonesome Crowded West at number 29 in their list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1990s, and the song "Trailer Trash" reached number 63 in their list of the 200 greatest songs of the decade.Spin ranked the album at number 59 in their list of the 100 greatest albums of 1985–2005, and Entertainment Weekly included the album in their list The Indie Rock 25.The A.V. Club has described The Lonesome Crowded West as the band's breakthrough recording. Sam Hockley-Smith, in a retrospective review for Stereogum, refers to The Lonesome Crowded West as "the album that made Modest Mouse a great band instead of just a good one" and writes that the primary theme of disillusionment in Brock's lyrics is "not pretty, but it's honest, and that honesty makes it beautiful, like Modest Mouse were desperately trying — and failing — to hold onto that last bit of naiveté."

...
Wikipedia