Ask Mitski Miyawaki about happiness and she'll warn you: "Happiness fucks you." It's a lesson that's been writ large into the New Yorker's gritty, outsider-indie for years, but never so powerfully as on her newest album, 'Puberty 2'. "Happiness is up, sadness is down, but one's almost more destructive than the other," she says. "When you realise you can't have one without the other, it's possible to spend periods of happiness just waiting for that other wave." On 'Puberty 2', that tension is palpable: a both beautiful and brutal romantic hinterland, in which one of America's new voices hits a brave new stride. The follow-up to 2014's 'Bury Me At Makeout Creek', named after a Simpsons quote and hailed by Pitchfork as "a complex 10-song story [containing] some of the most nuanced, complex and articulate music that's come from the indiesphere in a while," 'Puberty 2' picks up where its predecessor left off. "It's kind of a two parter," explains Mitski. "It's similar in sound, but a direct growth [from] that record." Musically, there are subtle evolutions: electronic drum machines pulse throughout beneath Pixies-ish guitars, while saxophone lights up its opening track. "I had a certain confidence this time. I knew what I wanted, knew what I was doing and wasn't afraid to do things that some people may not like."
