First Love / Late Spring

The restraint here is extraordinary — an arrangement of piano, guitar, and percussion that refuses to swell when you expect it to, that keeps pulling back from release in a way that creates sustained, architectural tension. Mitski's voice moves slowly through the melody, taking time with each phrase as if choosing each word carefully before committing to it. This is a song about early love and its particular distortions, the way new intimacy makes everything feel simultaneously more vivid and more threatening — the world more real in both directions at once. There's something specifically seasonal in the imagery, the ambiguity of spring as both beginning and exposure, something opening that could become beautiful or dangerous and cannot yet be told apart. The song understands that the two are often genuinely indistinguishable at the start. This comes from Puberty 2, which marked a step forward in her production ambitions while retaining the emotional directness of her earlier work. By this point she was among indie rock's most closely followed songwriters for a generation who recognized in her lyrics their own emotional landscape rendered more precisely than they could manage themselves. You'd listen to this in early spring, obviously — something changing in the air — or in any moment when something is beginning that you already sense will eventually cost you something real.