I can’t think of the last time an album’s title summed up the emotional state of its content quiet so succinctly as Mitski’s fourth album Puberty 2 does. Now in her mid-twenties, Mitski’s album marries the relentless melodrama of feeling everything for the first time while in your adolescents with the self-reflectiveness and dry wit of a more mature perspective.

The album starts with ‘Happy’. Beginning with a stuttering electronic drum sound, while Mitkski’s voice warbles, sounding quivering and uncertain. Suddenly a skronking sax line comes in and the song bursts into a driving piece of heartland rock. In the song, happiness is personified as a late night visitor who comes over to embrae her in a moment of passion. “He laid me down / and I felt happy/ come inside of me”. Maybe it’s a sniggering double entendre, but it speaks to how your sense of self-worth, love and sex can become so entangled they can become interchangeable. In fact ‘come’ is used in this double meaning throughout the album, both to signify orgasm but also as an invitation and beckoning. In the next verse, ‘Happy’ sneaks out while she’s in the bathroom and she’s left to clean up the mess he leaves behind. The song asks the question if happiness is really worth the effort. When it inevitably leaves you, all you’re left with is the acute sense of its absence.

‘Dan the Dancer’ is a vivid character study wrapped up in what a is simple punk rock number on first appearances. Mitski describes her insular protagonist learning how to be himself around another person and the feeling of liberation that comes with it. “Of course you couldn’t know / it was you and you alone / he had shown his bedroom dance routine”. It’s probably the album’s most optimistic moment. Showing how another person can offer you brief respite from yourself. But this is mainly because it’s one of the few times Mitski is able to step outside of herself. Something she longs to escape from on ‘Your Best American Girl’, the album’s glorious, soul-crushing centrepiece. It’s an ecstatic cry of wanting something so badly while also knowing you can never have it. What makes Mitski’s music so powerful is she realises these moments – when your emotions are so all encompassing that you can’t see anything else – are also the most life affirming. Like pinching yourself to see if you are in a dream, the pain makes you aware you are real and alive with excruciating clarity. It’s a song that has yet to be surpassed in 2016 by much.

Probably too much ink has already been spent on Mitski’s Asian American identity, especially as she says herself that her songs are meant to be universal odes to loss. But it’s hard not to equate the idea of a ‘best American girl’ with a particular symbol of whiteness, making Mitski doubly alienated from it because of her ethnicity. Musically the album draws on sounds typically dominated by white males, such as indie rock and folk. All of the genres the album absorbs are self-consciously used from the position of an outsider. She’s just as distant from whatever genre she is embodying as the subjects of her unrequited longing. There’s also a vein of beautifully subtle synth work running through the album, able to bring out those swells, like a sob rising in your chest.

A thrashing piece of lo-fi indie rock, ‘My Body’s Made of Crushed Stars’ would probably have been more at home on the more bare bones Bury Me at Makeout Creek. But it’s still more than welcome here. Mainly thanks to Mitski’s breath taking vocal delivery, the gain on her voice adding to the raw vulnerability.

Her voice is one of the album’s greatest strengths, able to inject devastating emotion into a single syllable. Every time she repeats “cry” on ‘Fireworks’, or “my baby” in ‘I Bet on Losing Dogs’ she’s able to ring amazing emotional range out of the phrases by using different emphasis or dragging out or shortening vowels. She belts with such emotion it sounds almost as if she might come apart at the seams. Often her voice wavers for just a moment, as if she’s about to become overwhelmed, before quickly regaining composure and carrying on.

‘Crack Baby’ with its clumsy drug addict metaphor, is probably the album’s weakest moment and also frustratingly the longest. When some of its other songs aren’t given anywhere near the amount of time they deserve, you wish the four plus minutes spent on this song had been given to something like the closer ‘A Burning Hill’ or the amazing ‘Fireworks’.

When we arrive to ‘A Burning Hill’, she dissolves completely into her own metaphor until the two are one and the same:

I am the forest fire/
and I am the fire and I am the forest/
and I am a witness watching it/
I stand in the valley watching it/
And you are not there at all .

Any which way she turns she is confronted by the fire, but more crucially it’s her self she sees everywhere in the place she longs to see someone else. Her solution? In the last lines of the album she offers a piece of stoicism:

I’ll go to work and I’ll go to sleep and I’ll love the littler thing /
I’ll love some littler things.

All you can do is love the little things. The little things like this beautiful and heart-breaking album.
Louis Ormesher

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