Depression and fits of anxiety have inspired plenty of great music, but there is something else taking shape in Mitski Miyawaki’s tense fourth album, Puberty 2: a detailed chronicling of the day-to-day interior struggle to be happy. The 25-year-old Brooklyn singer-songwriter is engaged in a larger struggle to pin down what, exactly, happiness is—at least for now, at that point in life when true adulthood starts to meet reality. Sometimes Mitski looks for contentedness in simple routine, like jogging or wearing a clean, white button-down. These small acts of control help stave off the larger dread, like not knowing how to pay rent or crawling out of her skin with wanderlust, feelings she addresses with incandescent punk rage on “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars.”
Other times, Mitski wonders if lovers might ease some of this anxiety, mostly finding that they just add to it. She begins Puberty 2 with a clever song-length metaphor about the fleeting nature of happiness, likening it to the boy who comes over with cookies, comes in her, and leaves while she’s in the bathroom. On “A Loving Feeling,” she laments a lust that leaves her feeling lonely, via men who “only love [her] when they're all alone.” Songs like this and “Once More to See You” are as much homages to ’60s girl-group romance as they are send-ups of the submission and loneliness underlying many of the original hits. But placed in the present, these songs seem to tap into the frustration of love at a time when there are myriad ways to be with someone, many of them willfully undefined.
Puberty 2 is grounded in Mitski’s distorted guitar, and at times feels like it’s in direct conversation with the very notion of the indie rock canon. This makes the album sound simultaneously familiar and challenging, never more so than on lead single “Your Best American Girl,” where she taps directly into what made people love early Weezer and other ’90s bands favoring a catchy/fuzzy dichotomy. What a satisfying twist, this half-Japanese transplant taking the specific sounds that once served to lust over her very existence and using them to not only reclaim her identity, but also to ache after heartbreak. At first the chorus goes, “Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me/But I do, I think I do,” but by the song’s conclusion, Mitski has grown more certain, shifting crucially to, “But I do, I finally do.”
Though its appeal is immediate, a song like “Your Best American Girl” is not knocked off quickly—there are layers and layers of sound here, generated by just Mitski and her producer Patrick Hyland. She has a knack for mixing dynamics and errant noises like some people mix patterns in their wardrobe: It shouldn’t make sense, but it does. Consider the album’s climax, “Crack Baby,” where a chintzy-on-purpose beat meets eerily precise vocal phrasing recalling Annie Clark, falsetto “ooohs,” smoldering waves of spaghetti western guitar, and a full minute of wind rustling on a cliffside. As Mitski likens her yearning for now-distant memories of happiness to the pull of inadvertent addiction, she sets the scene with a curious lyrical juxtaposition between man-made bleakness and natural beauty: “Down empty streets sniffing glue, me and you/Blank open eyes watch the moon flower bloom.”
This is the experience of listening to Mitski: When you look closely, everything is a little trickier than it had once seemed. Puberty 2 plumbs second-wave emo in the storytelling, wistful dream-pop to blunt the pain, slow-simmering electronics, brusquely strummed folk-punk, bits of surf guitar, and plenty of ’60s pop hooks; none of them show up just once, though, so they all end up feeling incorporated into the album’s overall sound. Her editing eye is impeccable, which it needs to be when mixing this many patterns.
There is, of course, a very simple rule for pattern-mixing: there must be unity in the color palette. Mitski’s very Mitski-ness is what holds Puberty 2 together. This quality is not relegated simply to her wry and articulate lyrics, staggering and sharp as many of them are. I can’t imagine mistaking a Mitski song for another’s, and it’s in large part because of her voice, which stretches through different modes—deadpan disenfranchisement, smooth R&B, dream-pop croon, gasping-for-breath pleas, wall of harmonies (with herself). Yet she fully harnesses every voice on the album, guiding us through emotional terrain only she knows by heart.
Mitski honed this versatility on three previous LPs of distinct material, from the unsettling and arch piano fare of her 2012 debut Lush to 2014’s scrappy Bury Me at Makeout Creek, her breakthrough and first “rock” album. On Puberty 2, every note she’s played comes together. It’s a resounding personal statement and the clearest sign that while she might be an “indie rock” artist, she currently stands apart from—and above—much of the genre. She tackles bigger themes, gambles with higher musical stakes, and digs deeper into herself.
Ultimately, Puberty 2 is for anyone who knows the power struggle between what we feel and what we want to feel. Mitski plays it like she’s losing this game for much of the album, but she knows better than to leave us so low. By the stunning dénouement “A Burning Hill,” she calls a truce with herself: “I’m tired of wanting more, I think I’m finally worn.” “I’ll love some littler things,” she sighs, knowing that for someone so complicated, it’s probably impossible.
