Mitski Miyawaki is deeply suspicious of her success. Ever since her third album – the riff-heavy, emotionally charged Bury Me at Makeout Creek – put her on the map in 2014, the buzz around her has hardly let up. In 2016, the album’s critically adored follow-up, Puberty 2, bolstered her already ardent fanbase, and she was invited on tour with alt-rock band Pixies and pop aesthete Lorde. A month ago, Iggy Pop described Mitski as “maybe the most advanced American songwriter that I know”. And throughout all this, she has been waiting “for the tide to turn and everyone to just decide to hate me”.

“When you’re happy for too long,” she explains, sitting in her label’s east London office, “you’re kind of waiting for something bad to happen. People decided they wanted to hate Anne Hathaway after she was so popular. For no reason. That’s a cycle that repeats itself everywhere.” As a pre-emptive strike, she decided to treat her new album, Be the Cowboy, which has received rapturous reviews from critics, as an act of self-sabotage. Whenever she veered too close to the sound that gained her praise in the past, she stuck a foot out and tripped herself up. “I fucked with the form, almost in ways that make me uncomfortable,” she says. “It’s almost like: ‘Well, before this goes to shit and you stop liking me, I’m going to do something that I know you won’t like, so that I’m the one who’s rejecting you.’”

But judging by the two singles she has released so far – Geyser, an eerie rumble with no repeated melodies that escalates into something manic and overwhelming, and Nobody, a disco-inflected ode to loneliness – that doesn’t seem to have happened. “Not yet!” In fact, people seem to have enthusiastically come along for the ride. “Mmhmm. Right. Just you wait.”

I find it hard to believe that the brilliant Be the Cowboy will spark Mitski’s Anne Hathaway moment. It flits between soft and brash, smooth and corrosive, insisting that you hear the gears grinding as it does so – a technique her fans are familiar with by now – but this time around, there is a deliberately unsettling sheen. The distorted guitars for which she has become known have been swapped out for bright, bold synths, electric organs or show-tune piano motifs. These aren’t straightforward pop songs – they are too weird and glitchy for that, and the melodies feel like they have been transposed half a note up or down – but they are just close enough that it all starts to feel a little Uncanny Valley. “There’s something subtly unhinged about it,” she says. “There’s something always a little bit off in the music.”

The same could be said of the lyrics. Through the guise of a fictional character – a neglected, repressed wife desperately seeking affection one moment, rejecting it the next – she addresses themes of isolation and self-destruction. “I just need someone to kiss,” she sings on Nobody. “Give me one good honest kiss / And I’ll be alright.” On A Pearl, she rescinds the request: “Sorry I can’t take your touch / It’s just that I fell in love with a war.” The character represents various aspects of Mitski’s own identity. The album, she says, is inherently feminine. “When I say feminine album, immediately the perception is that it must be soft and lovely, but I mean feminine in the violent sense. Desiring, but not being able to define your desire, wanting power but being powerless and blaming it on yourself, or just hurting yourself as a way to let out the aggression in you. It’s a lot of pent-up anger or desire without a socially acceptable outlet.”

Many people, young women in particular, will relate to this. Despite her self-defensive inclination towards burning bridges, Mitski’s ability and desire to write songs that people connect with has won out. “Everyone has a different reason for making music, mine is I want to feel connected to other people,” she says. She is Japanese American, and has spoken of feeling out of place in both cultures. “I’ve always grown up feeling lonely or other, but through my music, I can be like: ‘Look, we’re the same, we’ve felt the same thing, so we’re not so different. I belong here.’ It’s almost like a hungry monster that’s just a constant need to feel connection.”

Mitski … ‘People want to take something of me to keep with them’

Sometimes, though, Mitski is so good at connecting with people that it backfires. Her fans feel they know her more intimately than they actually do and occasionally act as though they are entitled to her time and attention. She recalls walking off stage after a recent concert, when fans grabbed her and shouted at her to take selfies with them. “That’s valid, I really appreciate it, but I was saying, ‘No, please stop, please let me go’, and everyone’s eyes were glazed over. I realised I wasn’t actually a fellow person; I was an idea. That’s what I’m uncomfortable with. People want to take something of me to keep with them, and I don’t want to be owned like that. I want to be a fellow person standing on the same ground, I don’t want to be someone’s little treasure in their pocket.”

Nor does she want to be put on a pedestal, and asked to represent something bigger than herself – though as an Asian American woman in an industry historically dominated by white men, she often finds herself painted as a figurehead. “The US is in political turmoil so people want change. They’re unsatisfied with their life, understandably, and then they see my face all the time and they put it together and think, ‘This person should fix it for me’. But I took like, maybe one American history course. I don’t know anything about politics or law, I’m just a dumb musician. I’m just as mystified as the person looking at my face. I don’t think it’s wise to turn to me for revolution, because I’m not equipped for that.”

But when it comes to her artistic worth, Mitski is self-assured. Though reviews of her work are usually glowing, she finds it galling when they imply the music must “just flow out of me”, as if she has no agency. “People cannot fathom the fact that maybe a woman created something from nothing, and that she has control over what she makes,” Mitksi says. “People have worked so hard to try to make me seem like I don’t know what I’m doing. But I know exactly what I’m doing.”