Puberty 2
On her fourth album, Mitski makes a resounding personal statement and stakes out her territory as one of the most compelling voices in the sphere of indie rock.
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…