Japanese Breakfast is a band that changes with each album, but still always feels like it should have been there all along. Since this is a mostly punk and horror movie site I’ll say some buzzwords for our catered audience. Japanese Breakfast is similar to Title Fight, Ceremony, and AFI. Every album offers a piece of what’s to come, but you never really pin down just how it will be executed. And every album works well with that surprise feeling.
After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts, Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), due March 21st on Dead Oceans, marks the band’s first proper studio release. Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills — an innovator of uncommon subtlety, known for his work with everyone from Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple and quietly regarded as many a legacy artist’s favorite guitar player — and tracked at the venerable Sound City in Los Angeles — birthplace of After The Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac and Nevermind among other classics — the record sees front-woman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined its predecessor Jubilee to examine the darker waves that roil within, the moody, fecund field of melancholy, long held to be the psychic state of poets on the verge of inspiration. The result is an artistic statement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel.
For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in Zauner’s life during which her GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions. Reflecting on that success, Zauner came to appreciate the irony of desire, which so often commingles bliss and doom. “I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” she says. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die.” The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album’s characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. Though Zauner has experimented with science fiction on Soft Sounds from Another Planet and buoyant surrealism on Jubilee, the landscape of European Romanticism that underpins For Melancholy Brunettes and the dense tissue of classical allusion that comes with it marks new territory for a songwriter entering her artistic maturity. She credits a range of antecedents with inspiration. The forlorn café girl in Degas’ “L’absinthe”. The seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich. The passionate longing and wild, undulating moors in Wuthering Heights. Hans Castorp wrapped in his camel hair blanket, dreaming on the Berghof balcony. It is an atmosphere made palpable by the intricate, interlocking guitar arrangements that accompany much of the record, lapping like waves over the meter, often as oblique in their expression of the chord as Zauner can be in her polyvalence of feeling and insight. Sadness is the dominant emotional key of this record, but it is sadness of a rarified form: the pensive, prescient sadness of melancholy, in which the recognition of life’s essentially tragic character occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty. Zauner finds space enough inside it for glimmers of hope. They are the consolations of mortals that poets before her have called out to and that poets after will continue to rediscover: love and labor, and though they run like tonic resolutions through the record’s many episodes.
Every J Brekkie album feels like a movie, and Zauner’s music videos always help push that narrative. Working with Mills feels like your favorite director got a big big break and is working with a massive budget, but specifically with a Roger Corman type producer. Everything sounds clean, everything falls into place, but the money is well spent and not just being blown freely. The “Orlando in Love” and “Mega Circuit” videos co exist in such a way that make For Melancholy Brunettes feel timeless. The handicam home movie vibe for “Mega Circuit” against the beauty that comes with “Orlando” spin around hand in hand.
My day job is working in the pop culture section of a library, and I remember when Crying In H Mart came out, arguing with the acquisitions woman that we should buy more than 4 copies of the book. I have never met Zauner, but I am always in her corner. I think we’re even friends on the Nintendo Switch online thingy. I am excited for this chapter and how it will feel to drive around with it this spring, then again laying in bed and taking it all in late at night. Truly a dream to see a DIY kid blow up like this, and I have already listened to the advance copy of this album so many times, on my work computer, in the car, and on my home computer, that I was locked out of the site because they thought I was sharing it around. Catch Japanese Breakfast on their first tour in 3 years and enjoy For Melancholy Brunettes(& sad women) due March 21st on Dead Oceans.
TOUR DATES:
Apr 12 & 19 – Indio, CA @ Coachella Music and Arts Festival
Apr 23 – Austin, TX @ Moody Theater (ACL Live) *
Apr 24 – Dallas, TX @ South Side Ballroom *
Apr 26 – Atlanta, GA @ Tabernacle *
Apr 27 – Charlotte, NC @ The Fillmore *
Apr 28 – Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium *
May 1 – Chicago, IL @ Salt Shed *
May 2 – Chicago, IL @ Salt Shed * – SOLD OUT
May 3 – Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore *
May 5 – Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall *
May 6 – Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall *
May 7 – Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway *
May 9 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount * – SOLD OUT
May 10 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount * – SOLD OUT
May 11 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount *
May 12 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount *
May 15 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Met Philadelphia Presented by Highmark *
May 16 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Met Philadelphia Presented by Highmark *
Jun 21 – Milwaukee, WI @ Summerfest
Jun 24 – Oslo, NO @ Rockefeller
Jun 25 – Stockholm, SE @ Filadelfia
Jun 26 – Copenhagen, DK @ VEGA
Jun 29 – Manchester, UK @ Academy 1
Jun 30 – Glasgow, UK @ Barrowland
Jul 1 – Bristol, UK @ O2 Academy Bristol
Jul 3 – London, UK @ O2 Academy Brixton
Jul 4-6 – Ewijk, NL @ Down The Rabbit Hole 2025
Jul 5 – Utrecht, NL @ TivoliVredenburg
Jul 8 – Paris, FR @ Le Trianon
July 10-12 – Bilbao, ES @ Bilbao BBK Live
Aug 23 – Santa Barbara, CA @ Santa Barbara Bowl *
Aug 27 – San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic *
Aug 28 – San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic * – SOLD OUT
Aug 30 – Bend, OR @ Hayden Homes Amphitheater *
Sep 1 – Vancouver, BC @ Orpheum Theater *
Sep 2 – Seattle, WA @ Woodland Park Zoo *
Sep 3 – Seattle, WA @ Woodland Park Zoo *
Sep 6 – Denver, CO @ The Mission Ballroom *
Sep 9 – St Paul, MN @ The Palace Theater *
Sep 10 – Madison, WI @ The Sylvee *
* w/ Ginger Root
