If anyone knows that high school doesn’t live up to the movies, it’s alt-rock musician Mitski Miyawaki. After a childhood spent moving from country to country (13 at least) with her American father and Japanese mother – she’d prefer not to disclose their occupations – she landed in the USA at the age of 15, the new girl once again. School didn’t exactly live up to her expectations. Rather than finally being a part of something, she found suspicious locker-room glances.

“I didn’t fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive I created this ‘ideal America’,” she explains as we walk through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. “Finally I came to the US and realised: ‘Oh, I don’t belong here, either.’”

Today, that sense of otherness hangs heavy in Mitski’s lo-fi guitar anthems and speaks loudly to anyone who’s ever felt awkward, or as if they didn’t belong. There were hints of it on the 24-year-old’s first two albums, 2012’s Lush and 2013’s Retired From Sad, New Career In Business, recorded while she was at college in upstate New York. Then came her 2014 indie breakout Bury Me At Makeout Creek, with its fuzz-swaddled melodies and lyrics about the violence of love (comparisons to fellow lone-rocker Angel Olsen and Weezer’s album Pinkerton followed).



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. 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”. Puberty 2 explores a USA no one grew up in, a teen romcom fantasy of cheerleaders, football games and keg parties. Except, even at their most romantic, these moments are tinged with longing and loneliness.

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. “At least when I was abroad, there was a sense that, ‘She’s weird because she’s from a different culture’,” she says. “When I got here it was just, ‘She, as an individual, is weird.’ It was me, as a person: I was flawed.”

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 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.”

Mistki performs live at SXSW earlier this year. Photograph: Waytao Shing/Getty Images for SXSW

Mitski’s music has a sadness that resonates even if you don’t own a varsity jacket. But to paint her purely as angst-ridden would be unfair. For a start, she has a sly sense of humour. 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.

Sometimes that can be lost on critics who are more concerned with writing up her emotional side. Such attitudes both perplex and vex Mitski. “People talk about my music like it’s totally confessional, or so honest and raw, and ‘it just pours out of her’,” she says. This removes her own agency from her music. “Even when I’m writing and performing it, [people say], ‘Oh no, she has no control over it, it overcomes her. Why is it so hard to understand that my brain is in my control?”

Be 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. 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). Vulture called the video an attack on “white indie America”, while New York Magazine gleefully described it as a satire on cutesy “festival girls”. Mitski felt she had to tweet a response. “Don’t pit me against other girls,” she wrote, “it’s not about that.”

She says she thinks a lot about the way people represent her. “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. “I didn’t go into this thinking, ‘Let me subvert something,’ or as an activist. I’m in it because I love music and that’s what I do. I’m a musician.”

Such remarks make for rare moments of earnestness in an interview punctuated by comedy. 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. She tells me a story before she goes, one that captures her mixture of sincerity and detachment perfectly. At one school she attended, she chose not to speak to anyone for the entire year, just for fun. “At the leaving concert,” she says, “I got up onstage and sang I Will Always Love You. Then I left.” And that, America, is how your best girl does it.

Puberty 2 is out now on Dead Oceans; Mitski tours 1 to 6 Oct; tour starts Green Door Store, Brighton