Japanese Breakfast For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
Sadness can be beautiful, but rarely (in pop music, anyway) is it BIG. Michelle Zauner, the singer-songwriter behind Japanese Breakfast, has shared her grief with us before, in projects as disparate as the band’s 2016 debut, Psychopomp, and her memoir centered around her mother’s death from cancer, 2021’s Crying in H Mart. While those works evoke a more targeted sense of sadness, the band’s fourth album, helpfully titled For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), displays a more amorphous ennui, the kind of, well, melancholia that comes from reaching a certain plateau in adulthood and finding out you don’t know what’s next.
Japanese Breakfast is the type of band that, both by choice and necessity, has recorded most of their work somewhat on the fly, making use of whatever space they were in. As it turns out, For Melancholy Brunettes is the band’s first true studio recording. Zauner and producer Blake Mills took full advantage of their upscaled surroundings to come up with a bigger sound for Zauner’s songs, including strings and woodwinds – it’s a fullness that Japanese Breakfast has toyed with on their more recent shows (and their last record, 2021’s decidedly more upbeat Jubilee), but here, it’s employed to a more dramatic degree. From the subtle, celeste-led open of “Here Is Someone,” it’s clear we’re going to hear one of the most beautiful-sounding indie records to date. Lyrically, Zauner presents a major theme for the record – comfort in the status quo vs. striving for true happiness – in the song’s first verse: “Quietly dreaming of/Slower days, but I don’t want to/Let you down we’ve come so far/Can you see a life where we leave this behind?” The sound that grows throughout “Here Is Someone” continues into the album’s first single, “Orlando in Love,” a fanciful, string-filled tune blending Renaissance poets and the modern day niceties of Winnebagos and “69 cantos.”
There are some more familiar, indie pop-type songs on For Melancholy Brunettes. “Honey Water,” led by Matt Chamberlain’s propulsive drums, ruminates on the damage done by unfaithfulness – “They say only love can change a man but all that changes is me” – and is punctuated by searing guitar work from Zauner and Mills. “Mega Circuit” is simultaneously bouncy and pensive as Zauner spits on “incel eunuchs” and their flaccid plans for world domination. “Picture Window” is a subtly danceable delight sprinkled with Mills’ pedal steel, an instrument that makes a grander appearance in “Men in Bars.” On a record full of lush sounds and artistic references, For Melancholy Brunettes’ best moments arrive via this beer-soaked lament, featuring a rugged vocal turn from Jeff Bridges. Against a background of romantic mayhem and impending murder, Zauner again finds a (potentially destructive) escape route out of the crushing banality of adulthood – “But who could say that I’m to blame/For wandering?/I never knew I’d find my way into the arms/Of men in bars” In the recent swirl of talk of what “is” and “isn’t” country, it’s unexpectedly here, on a cinematic indie album, that Michelle Zauner, with an unvarnished assist from an Oscar winner, slyly gives us one of this year’s best (and most beautiful) twangers.
Song I Can’t Wait to Hear Live: “Men in Bars” – Michelle Zauner and Bad Blake? Gimme.
For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) was produced by Blake Mills, engineered by Joseph Lorge, mixed by Lorge and Mills and mastered by Patricia Sullivan. All songs written by Zauner. Musicians on the album include Lauren Baba (violin, viola), Dory Bavarsky (Wurlitzer, celeste, piano, Rhodes), Jeff Bridges (vocals), Matt Chamberlain (drums), Craig Hendrix (drums, percussion), Jim Keltner (drums), Alam Khan (sarod), Joseph Lorge (organ), Karl McComas-Reichl (bass, cello), Blake Mills (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, fretless guitar, 12 string guitar, slide guitar, pedal steel, bass, mandolin, synth, organ, piano, percussion, gamelan, recorder), Adam Schatz (saxophone) and Michelle Zauner (vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, piano, gamelan, mandolin, synth, omnichord, celeste, castanets).
Go here to order For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) (out March 21): https://japanesebreakfast.rocks/#shop
Check out tour dates here: https://japanesebreakfast.rocks/#tour
Enjoy our previous coverage here: One Writer’s 2025 Musical Wish List
