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Puberty 2 by Mitski, released 17 June 2016 1. Dan the Dancer 3. Once More to See You 4. Your Best American Girl 6. I Bet on Losing Dogs 7. My Body's Made of Crushed Little Stars 8. Thursday Girl 9. A Loving Feeling 10. Crack Baby 11. A Burning Hill Ask Mitski Miyawaki about happiness and she'll warn you: “Happiness fucks you.”.
PHILADELPHIA — For most of Mitski Miyawaki’s childhood, she was on the move. Because of her father’s job, she lived in 13 countries — a constant carousel of arrivals and departures, attaching and detaching, trying to fit in, if only for the moment.
But even when she was still, she had ways of destabilizing herself. Her teenage years were defined by wild edges that she acknowledges but declines to detail. Music, she said, was the thing that grounded her, and convinced her she should press forward.
So if there is a life force pulsing through Mitski’s music — she performs under her first name — it’s not accidental.
“Not to be cheesy, but I do think music helped me not die,” Mitski, 25, said one afternoon last month in a crumbling alcove in the backyard of the quaint Random Tea Room & Curiosity Shop here, a train ride from her parents’ home in the suburbs. “Maybe this is a made-up belief to preserve myself, but I do believe that everyone has a purpose, and my purpose is to put out music that means something. Every time I would almost just not make it, I would be like, ‘But I have this thing that I can do, this thing that gives me a passport that allows me to be here.’”
“Puberty 2,” her fourth album, due out June 17, is purple like a new bruise, an impressive collection of D.I.Y. punk and indie rock that’s her most expansive work yet. There’s more variety in her singing, which moves from aggrieved to sultry to resigned. And there’s more ambition in the music, which doubles down on grit while also rounding things out with a buffer of soul.
It is an impressive follow-up to her 2014 breakout, the startlingly raw and vibrant “Bury Me at Makeout Creek.” That was her first lo-fi excursion after a pair of albums recorded with an orchestra when she was in college, and it established her as one of the most promising voices in indie music, as unafraid of tackling institutional sexism and racism as the fraught crevices of her own heart.
The emotional tenor of “Makeout Creek,” she said, “was like “I’m angryyyyy’ or ‘I’m saaaaaaad,’ and that was the world, but then I grew up a little.” The new album is somehow less pessimistic without being more optimistic. It contains some staggeringly beautiful, hopelessly pained imagery, the sort of moments that crisply convey a whole world of anxiety in a few words.
On the elegiac “I Bet on Losing Dogs,” she commiserates with the helpless and the hopeless:
I know they’re losing and I pay for my place by the ring
where I’ll be looking in their eyes when they’re down
I’ll be there on their side, I’m losing by their side.
where I’ll be looking in their eyes when they’re down
I’ll be there on their side, I’m losing by their side.
And one of this album’s standouts is the controlledly tense “Fireworks,” an ode to stoic forgetting, to the need to remain implacable in the face of devastation:
One morning this sadness will fossilize and I will forget how to cry
I’ll keep going to work
and you won’t see a change
save perhaps a slight gray in my eye
I will go jogging routinely
calmly and rhythmically run
and when I find that a knife’s sticking out of my side I’ll pull it out without questioning why.
I’ll keep going to work
and you won’t see a change
save perhaps a slight gray in my eye
I will go jogging routinely
calmly and rhythmically run
and when I find that a knife’s sticking out of my side I’ll pull it out without questioning why.
When Mitski smarts, it sticks. “I have a very conveniently photographic memory of emotions — it’s overwhelming, because things don’t fade for me,” she said. Each year, she said, she gets less and less sleep, as more and more life keeps replaying in her mind.
“It’s very good for songwriting,” she conceded, “’cause something could happen three years ago, and I could be in that moment and write emotively about it. It’ll be there, for better or for worse.”
For years, because of her constant movement, memories and feelings were all Mitski could carry with her, fomenting an acceptance of impermanence and a reluctance to trust too deeply. “If I attached, it means I’d have to detach,” she said. “I just kind of floated above so that it wasn’t as hard to live.”
The constant moving also shaped her approach to music-making. “I’m not much of a gear person, not much of a production person,” she said. “I emphasize the composition because I grew up not having things or losing things. A lot of my music is still made that way — I make it so that there are as few musicians as possible.” (In the credits for “Puberty 2,” she acknowledges her producer, Patrick Hyland, “who I made this with, just him and me.”)
“What’s important to me,” she continued, “is that my songs can exist without any material anything. It’s very reflective of my ideology.”
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In a sense, she also wants to ensure that the songs can exist even without her. For Mitski, the body is just a means to the art: “Me, myself, I actually have very little care about,” she said. That is in part a byproduct of a lifetime of itinerancy, constant reinvention and minimizing of the self. But Mitski’s music — scarred, vulnerable, immediate — often blurs the line between what’s private and what’s open for scrutiny. She feels acutely the tension of being a private person suddenly thrust under a microscope — even if she herself has done the thrusting.
“It’s like I’m sending out messages in bottles, but very picky and stubborn and selfish in that I only want the right person to receive it,” she said. “I want to connect, but I also want to be left alone.”
The result is a blend of radical transparency — as on her Twitter account, where she sprays thoughts fast and furious — and walled-off protection of her private life. And in person, she is selectively evasive, speaking with extreme ideological certainty but also clear emotional reluctance, deciding with each moment which one to prioritize. “I’m learning to be open in certain aspects of my life to almost create a red herring so that other stuff can remain private,” she said. “Sometimes I feel more like myself onstage as a performer than I do offstage.”
Her accessibility also causes her stress over her influence on others, an unease only exacerbated because of how race is lived and experienced in America. “Most public people who aren’t white feel this pressure and are asked to represent everybody,” she said. “I know for a fact that I’m problematic. I shouldn’t be looked to for any kind of guidance.”
“I have to go out and consciously say, ‘I’m a person, I can’t be a role model, I’m not a representative of anything,’” she continued. “I have to consciously go out and do that, or else it’s gonna be put upon me.”
Mitski said all this not with tension, but with a shrug: A lifetime of pinballing from place to place has taught her to retain power over things that one can control while ceding concern about the things one can’t. That said, she sometimes wonders about whether the most appropriate response to the increasingly unmanageable parts of her public life would be sabotage. “I think about it all the time,” she said. “Every day, I’m like: ‘What if I just destroy this? Then maybe that would save me.’”
She added: “If the music went away and I stopped being this way and I could just be a normal healthy person with a regular job, I would do that in a heartbeat. I really would. I would love to be just happy.”
A different answer, though, comes in learning how to settle down, how to say hello rather than goodbye, how to trust that people won’t leave when the chips are down. “I’m trying to break the cycle of thinking only fraught situations bring meaningful art,” she said.
To that end, she’s already written much of her next album. “There are songs on that record about just loving somebody,” she said. And it feels O.K.
The taxing climbs and tumbling falls between puberty’s ecstatic peaks and hopeless valleys result in some serious emotional motion sickness, leaving you confused and disoriented by the time you’re spat out into adulthood. Mitski Miyawaki’s new album, Puberty 2, is more akin to a vast, brutally lonely desert. Her last record, 2014’s Bury Me At Makeout Creek, was raw to the point of emotional gore. Mitski, who previously described herself as a “tall child,” has gone from wanting “a love that falls as fast as a body from the balcony” to wondering, “What do you do with a loving feeling/ If the loving feeling makes you all alone.”
Trained in studio composition at SUNY Purchase (where she made her first two albums, 2012’s Lush and 2013’s Retired From Sad, New Career in Business), the unhinged catharsis of Mitski’s folk pop songs is expressed through her intricate and hi-fi symphonic arrangements. Bury Me At Makeout Creek worked through this catharsis with eruptive energy, massive spoonfuls of existential uncertainty, and song structures that often started soft and unassuming before climaxing in relief and anguish.
With the help of longtime producer Patrick Hyland, Mistki’s only collaborator to date, Puberty 2 revisits these feelings with simmering control, and simple yet powerful instrumental accompaniment. These new songs appear both dejected and joyous, depending on the lighting. There are fewer moments of complete chaos, giving over instead to more detailed-oriented dissections of experiences from puberty. While this might sound like dangerous territory for an artist who’s known for searing riffs and vicious live performances that include screaming into the pickups of her guitar, Mitski uses her voice to measure the slightest nuances within complex emotions.
Opening track “Happy” begins with 30 seconds of sterile, rhythmic thudding that sounds like the finale of an old washing machine’s spin cycle. Over minimalist keyboard and this terse syncopation, Mitski numbly sings about a visit from “Happy”, her story slowly unfolding against unexpected saxophone solos and grungy distortion. She vividly illustrates the minute degrees between happiness and despair — first Happy is visiting with cookies, next he’s gone and all that’s left are “wrappers and empty cups of tea.” Her detached heartbreak sounds disappointed but not surprised, instead resigned in sadness: “Well I sighed and mumbled to myself/ Again I have to clean.” While it’s presumably detailing an encounter with a flyaway love, “Happy” also plays like a lament to the elusive nature of feeling good, an anthem for getting out the proverbial mop again after a particularly messy breakdown.
The love Mitski emanates seems anxious. On the ballad “Once More to See You”, she sings a duet with herself, pleading, “If you would let me give you pinky promises kisses/ Then I wouldn’t have to scream your name atop of every roof in the city of my heart.” It sounds like she’s conducting a half-speed orchestra of bated percussion, supple bass, and buzzy organ, with her own honeyed self-harmonizing capturing the intersection of love and loneliness.
Standout “Fireworks” finds Mitski in the depths of loneliness, beginning with a drum machine beat, low guitar tones, and a prognosis: “One morning this sadness will fossilize and I will forget how to cry.” This sounds bleak, but it’s also decidedly hopeful — though sadness might remain an indelible scar, the chronic pain will be dulled with time. This realization is greeted with both celebratory church bells and ominous synths, allowing jubilance and gloom to harmoniously coexist.
Mitski often describes feeling like an outsider; she was born in Japan and has lived in a dozen countries. This sentiment is reflected in Puberty 2’s almost caricatural indie rock epic, “Your Best American Girl”. Here she mourns the impossibility of a requited love that’s still off-limits, because, as she belts against throttling, clangorous guitars, “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me /But I do, I think I do/ And you’re an all-American boy/ I guess I couldn’t help try to be your best American girl.” It plays like part two of Retired From Sad‘s ebullient “Strawberry Blonde”, where she giddily sings, “All I ever wanted was a life in your shape.” This followup sounds like the devastating realization that she can’t, and perhaps shouldn’t have to, change her own shape to fit into that of this all-American boy.
The following track is the album’s understated masterpiece, the fuzzed-out and spacy doo-wop of “I Bet on Losing Dogs”. Mitski overflows tenderness as she coos to her “baby,” asking for a response. From there, she digs deeper, hoping for more: “Would you let me, baby, lose/ On losing dogs,” she sighs. “I want to feel it.” The song’s fuming intensity intimates that she wants so desperately to live in this shadow of love even if it’s not the real thing.
If Puberty 2 has a weakness, it’s the tepid conclusion. After the record’s subdued but complete emotional upheaval, closing duo “Crack Baby” and “A Burning Hill” fall softly, Mitski simply resolving to “love some littler things.” It’s unsatisfying, but there’s something fitting about this undramatic ending. After puberty’s exhausting highs and lows, there’s comfortable beauty in the introspective moments where happiness and sadness can linger together.
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Essential Tracks: “I Bet on Losing Dogs”, “Fireworks”, and “Your Best American Girl”