Mitski is at her best when she's trying to make you uncomfortable. Discomfort and jaggedness are the hallmarks of her most inspired musical moments: the offbeat glitches and droning synth in Be The Cowboy opener "Geyser," the percussive stomps and wretched screams of "Drunk Walk Home," the Tiny Desk performance of "Class of 2013."

To be honest, I don't know how much of that Mitski we have left. It shows up in bits and spurts on her latest record, Nothing's About To Happen to Me, but with age and the continued solidification of her status as a defining star of her generation, her emotive methods have calmed.

Puberty 2 is the album that resulted from all of Mitski's best artistic instincts. At just 25, she had three other albums to her name: 2014's buzzy slacker rock opus Bury Me At Makeout Creek, and college projects Lush and Retired from Sad, New Career in Business. As her artistic growing pains were subsiding and commercial success had yet to become much of a factor, Puberty 2 sees Mitski at her most uninhibited.

That underpinning of discomfort begins immediately. A pulsing, unidentifiable drum machine pre-set opens the record; in its wake, the song "Happy" provides a taste of the unique brand of frustration and sorrow that Puberty 2 embodies. "If you're going, take the train / So I can hear it rumble / One last rumble," she pleads in the chorus. Her lover has Irish-goodbyed after a session of snacks and sex, but all she's left to do is sigh and clean up the mess. The sax solo that plays her out is eventually drowned out by that same drum machine – she's back to where she started.

You could list off the decades of sonic influences that pop up on Puberty 2 like a game of Scattergories: the sudden, brash sonic juxtapositions and melodic sensibilities of St. Vincent; the lo-fi folk punk of Neutral Milk Hotel; even the plainly stated somber lyricism of '60s crooners like Patsy Cline. But amidst all of those influences births a sound that is indisputably Mitski's. It's the sound that had me crying in Dunkin' parking lots as a 16 year old and still clutching my pillow to my chest at 22.

When Mitski vies to really emote in her delivery, it's a deeply conscious choice. Take the record's two biggest hits, the sequential "Your Best American Girl" and "I Bet on Losing Dogs."

The former features Mitski's most impassioned vocal delivery on the whole record, pleading for a lover to accept their cultural differences: "Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me / But I do, I think I do / You're an all-American boy / I guess I couldn't help trying to be your best American girl," she belts atop blaring electric guitar.

By contrast, the misery of "I Bet on Losing Dogs" remains understated. Her delivery barely extends beyond a defeated deadpan, even during the deeply confessional altered final chorus:

I wanna feel it
I bet on losing dogs
I always want you when I'm finally fine
How you'd be over me
Looking in my eyes when I cum
Someone to watch me die

There is no grand finale, just a fade into droning dejectedness. Oftentimes, it is the absence of good that looms darker than any individual tragedy.

That absence-induced malaise weaves throughout the rest of the record. As put by critic Jill Mapes in her Best New Music review, "Puberty 2 is for anyone who knows the power struggle between what we feel and what we want to feel."

"Crack Baby," more than any other song, encompasses just that. She likens happiness to the confused desires of an actual crack baby: "Crack baby, you don't know what you want / But you know that you had it once / And you know that you want it back." The song's production is hauntingly sparse at the start, just looping hi-hat and off-beat synth bass, but blossoms into something of a trip-hop-adjacent ballad by the second chorus.

There are few records that really portray depression and growing pains quite how Puberty 2 does. The more it attempts to make the listener uncomfortable, the more visceral it feels. "It's an album with a quiet, profound force to it," critic Tom Breihan said in his "Album of the Week" review for Stereogum. It's the cautionary tale of a woman who feels much more maladjusted to adulthood than her self-awareness may suggest. It's a feeling that Mitski definitely has been able to recapture since, but not nearly as concentrated or poised as it is here.

I really do feel bad for Mitski at times. Just after trying to leave the public eye entirely to become a Nashville ghostwriter, Mitski became much more famous than she ever intended to without doing anything to incite it. For no discernible central reason, a handful of songs from her back catalog (including but not limited to "Washing Machine Heart," "I Bet on Losing Dogs," and "Me and My Husband") went viral on TikTok during the throes of the pandemic. By the time the world came out on the other side, she was touring venues twice the size of her previous romps.

Right before her tour behind 2021's Laurel Hell, Mitski posted a now-deleted Twitter thread politely asking her fans to chill out at shows and perhaps not film the entire set. As you could imagine, people were not particularly receptive, and the discourse pretty closely mirrored that of what sparked from Phoebe Bridgers recently announcing a fully phone-free arena tour.

Suffice to say she's being vindicated amidst this never-ending discourse. Her fanbase has grown younger and legitimately maladjusted. One fan felt the need to scream "MOTHER IS MOTHERING" during a quiet changeover at the date of the Land is Inhospitable tour I attended. It's above my pay grade to ascribe solutions to this issue, but if Mitski wants to start making disillusioned, off-putting music again as a response, I'd be the last to stop her.