Japanese Breakfast (Dead Oceans)

Japanese Breakfast frontwoman Michelle Zauner has been on quite an interesting journey since the release of her Grammy-nominated album, Jubilee, which came out in 2021. Along with the successful album, Zauner also released a bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart, chronicling her love of Korean food and the loss of her mother. Then there was a proposed film adaptation of her memoir, for which she wrote the screenplay, although due to the Hollywood strikes, the project never came to fruition. This all proved to be a metamorphic period in Zauner’s life. While her success was skyrocketing and her artistic ambitions were being met, it also made Zauner appreciate the irony of desire, and how sometimes wanting and achieving too much can backfire.

“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.”

In the aftermath, Zauner decided to record new music and take a break from the spotlight by moving to Seoul, where she immersed herself in Korean language and culture. The result of this self-prescribed exile is the fourth Japanese Breakfast album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), which finds Zauner pulling away from the bright tones that defined Jubilee in order to examine darker and moodier motifs. The album’s characters go through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution, and she contemplates themes of anxiety and death. While the music tends to be hypnotic and dreamy, the lyrics are pensive, poetic, and tragic. 

“Over the course of promoting this new album I’ve often been asked to clarify the difference between melancholy and sadness,” Zauner explains. “I think of melancholy as a kind of anticipatory grief, one that comes from an acknowledgment of the passage of time, from the recognition of mortality and finitude. In some way, too, I think it marks the artist’s condition, constantly observing through that lens. ‘Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy,’ Virginia Woolfe writes. I wanted this album to capture the moments where that knife slips. When people want too much, when they cede to temptation, when they are seduced and punished.”

After the success of the album’s first single, "Orlando In Love," the latest single, "Picture Window," is climbing the Triple A charts. "Picture Window" is spinning at WXPN, WYMS, WFUV, WRLT, KTBG, and many other stations, while the album had climbed to #12 on the JBE Non-Comm chart at press time. Japanese Breakfast’s tour in support of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) kicks off with a performance at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in Indio, CA in April, and continues with headline shows across North America through May, before heading overseas.