Mitski Miyawaki’s last album, 2016’s Puberty 2, likened the messiness of early adulthood—the imbalance, the awkwardness, the near-constant feeling of being in over your head—to a second adolescence. Historically, Mitski’s songs have been peppered with all of these pain points, particularly as they relate to disappointing lovers and half-baked romances. It’s remarkable, then, to hear Miyawaki speak so straightforwardly and assuredly about love on her new single, “Geyser,” which accompanies the announcement of her fifth album, Be The Cowboy. “You’re the one I want,” she sings, her voice soft and steady, “And I’ve turned down every hand that has beckoned me to come.” The structure of the song defies logic, just as its subject does: Miyawaki has scrapped the verse-chorus-verse-bridge structure, instead building out three separate hooks and pasting them together, one after the other. Midway through the song, everything erupts like—not to be too obvious—a geyser, guitars and violins crescendoing as Miyawaki professes her devotion.

But to call “Geyser” a straight-ahead love song is to undercut the nuance of Miyawaki’s songwriting. Geysers, after all, are not only natural wonders, but also sites of gruesome, random casualty. The nails-on-chalkboard strings that accompany Miyawaki’s opening lines seem to signal looming disaster until they quickly slide into a friendlier major key; the TV static that fractures the intro feels similarly ominous. Miyawaki has often felt a bit removed from her writing, narrating her own mishaps at an arm’s length. With these touches, and with lyrics that draw a line between harmony and harm, she inserts a bit of skepticism into her rapture, acknowledging the danger of obsession spiraling out of control—which is what appears to be happening in the song’s accompanying video. In it, Mitski appears on an overcast beach, sprinting away from the camera, crashing to the ground, manically digging in the sand. Who among us really thought Mitski’s world would suddenly turn rose-colored?