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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.