RetroSpectreview: Mitski – Puberty 2

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“I told him I’d do anything to have him stay with me
So he laid me down and I felt Happy come inside of me”

In a decade that may be remembered for soft sounds and dulled senses, Puberty 2 has the capacity to provoke a genuinely rare physiological reaction, and not just the normal waterworks. You may start to taste copper, feel your heart quicken, drown in primordial feelings you managed to bury years ago. You wouldn’t be alone; Mitski Miyawaki struck a deep nerve in her follow-up to Bury Me at Makeout Creek, and its formidable power hasn’t dimmed in the three years since it was released. What is this record doing so differently from so many others? Perhaps it’s simply that perfect combination of sound and vision; the little touches of noise bookending each song that so effectively conjure anxiety, the way the tracks are produced not for volume but for sheer trembling power, the way Mitski’s voice is not only effortlessly technical but sincerely affective in its controlled desperation. Take “Once More To See You,” a song that treats infatuation with a knowing, lived-in sense of doom: every ingredient is treated with crushing heaviness, from the metallic thud and panned reverb of the drums to the bass that hits the bottom of your stomach to Mitski’s lone opening sigh before her chorused vocals completely embody the inner voice that claws at the walls of your heart. On “I Bet On Losing Dogs” Mitski outlines the struggle of dating someone with depression, but in the way the melody swings around seemingly aimlessly until it hits another equally-aimless key, combined with the bit-crushed synth accompaniment and Mitski’s understated delivery (with her Greek harmonic chorus), you get everything associated with that struggle in one bite: the buried grief and frustration, the sense that the narrator understands where she resides in the relationship and how she internalizes it in a way that should be ambiguous if the song wasn’t so explicitly designed to be tragic.

If Puberty 2 is not this decade’s quintessential indie rock album, it definitely belongs in that pantheon. At its core, it fits the genre to a T (all internal suffering relayed in external terms) but all throughout it’s constructed with careful thought and executed flawlessly. Its best songs, including the searing “Your Best American Girl” and the conflicted “Happy” rank as some of the finest offerings this decade’s rock has to offer. But even besides that, it’s remarkable how on every sonic and lyrical level it encapsulates contemporary young adulthood, and it does so in ways that are not only devastatingly accurate but truly novel. There’s no question about innocence lost, no false inferences about where happiness comes from or whether its eternal, just one foot continuing to stumble over another as your brain scolds you for knowing better. If it’s not Mitski herself in these songs, there’s at least sympathy for those who are fearful of weaving more callouses (“Dan The Dancer”), who seek to find themselves in social habits that erode them physically and mentally (“Thursday Girl”), who reconcile society’s bludgeoning ideals with their realities (“My Body’s Made Of Crushed Little Stars”).

Indeed, that last song is the answer key that links the album’s disparate vignettes: becoming an adult means having your sense of idealism slowly consumed by the mundanities of your day-to-day existence. It’s what makes the closing track, “A Burning Hill,” so unbelievably powerful, especially as it comes after an album’s length of these stories. As a conceit, it’s a deeply sad, crushingly heavy moment, as over fresh-stretched guitar strings Mitski resigns herself to a life free of the kinds of big, powerful awakenings that filled the previous half-hour. The parts are devastatingly simple (the specifics of her imagery, her turns of phrase, the way “Happy” comes back into the frame) but the spark for all this tinder is, once again, that voice: soft yet urgent, controlled yet canvas-like, a fitting vessel for the audience’s deep-seated fears. Moments like this only come when earned, as failing to lay the groundwork for the song’s eventual emergence would sap all of its power. Really though, that’s the mark of a great artist; it’s hard to imagine these songs better off in the hands of virtually anyone else.

That’s why Puberty 2 will be hard for her to top, even going forward from her true breakthrough, 2018’s Be The Cowboy. It was the moment where Mitski took the voice she finalized on Makeout Creek and used it to design a layered twist on the old “death of innocence” theme without once falling into cliche. Dissimilarly to anything she’s done before or since, this record drips with personality, a certain character that makes it feels like its own biome. Where each song ripples with emotion, the next borrows from it and builds, creating a feedback loop that lasts until its bloodletting conclusion. But on top of all this, its beauty comes from how downright repulsive it can be at times, so much so that it might be instinct to look away. Most adults have lived in these pathetic circumstances, tied helplessly to catastrophic relationships, burning for the impossible, grieving for the world, falling face-first in a watching crowd, so deeply vulnerable to the point where these all seem like preferable situations. It’s a testament to the album’s greatness that, in its scope, we’re willing to summon these moments again and again.