Puberty 2 is out now on Dead Oceans Mitski tours 1 to 6 Oct tour starts Green Door Store, Brighton Then I left.” And that, America, is how your best girl does it. “At the leaving concert,” she says, “I got up onstage and sang I Will Always Love You. At one school she attended, she chose not to speak to anyone for the entire year, just for fun. She tells me a story before she goes, one that captures her mixture of sincerity and detachment perfectly. Mitski seems quite happy to laugh at herself, as we manage to get lost on our walk around the park or at me, when, at one point, a bird poops on my shoulder and she holds my hair out of the way, like a devoted friend on your drunkest night out. Such remarks make for rare moments of earnestness in an interview punctuated by comedy. I’m in it because I love music and that’s what I do. “I didn’t go into this thinking, ‘Let me subvert something,’ or as an activist. “On the one hand it’s really cool that we’re talking about these things, but it’s turning me into a trope, even if the intentions are good,” she says. She says she thinks a lot about the way people represent her. “Don’t pit me against other girls,” she wrote, “it’s not about that.” Vulture called the video an attack on “white indie America”, while New York Magazine gleefully described it as a satire on cutesy “festival girls”. When the video for Your Best American Girl was released, for example, countless conclusions were drawn about a white couple who appear snogging in the film (while Mitski watches from a distance). Why is it so hard to understand that my brain is in my control?”īe it in relation to her Japanese-American heritage, or her status as a female solo musician with a guitar, her supporters also seem desperate for her to be subversive. “Even when I’m writing and performing it,, ‘Oh no, she has no control over it, it overcomes her. This removes her own agency from her music. “People talk about my music like it’s totally confessional, or so honest and raw, and ‘it just pours out of her’,” she says. Such attitudes both perplex and vex Mitski. Sometimes that can be lost on critics who are more concerned with writing up her emotional side. It’s evident in the video to Your Best American Girl, where she makes out with her hand, or the fact that her album title sounds, ironically, like a low-budget frat flick. For a start, she has a sly sense of humour. But to paint her purely as angst-ridden would be unfair. Mitski’s music has a sadness that resonates even if you don’t own a varsity jacket.

Photograph: Waytao Shing/Getty Images for SXSW Mistki performs live at SXSW earlier this year. When I note that she appears to be an outsider even in her own music, she replies, “If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.” Sometimes – on songs such as Fireworks, where she offers marriage to “silence”– it’s as though Mitski has given up on people altogether.

“When I got here it was just, ‘She, as an individual, is weird.’ It was me, as a person: I was flawed.” “At least when I was abroad, there was a sense that, ‘She’s weird because she’s from a different culture’,” she says. Mitski often talks about the alienation she felt in her youth, a feeling which, even now, as a musician who is usually away on tour and has only a loose base in Philadelphia, she can’t escape. Except, even at their most romantic, these moments are tinged with longing and loneliness. Puberty 2 explores a USA no one grew up in, a teen romcom fantasy of cheerleaders, football games and keg parties. Lovers are spied in a car’s rear-view mirror, a boy loses his virginity over Pixies-esque guitar lines and, in single Your Best American Girl, Mitski both gives a nod to classic rock and her heart to an “all-American boy”. Mitski’s latest work, titled Puberty 2, explores this “ideal America” concept even further, celebrating the cliches of high school while observing them from a distance.

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