Korean-American singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner’s band, Japanese Breakfast, make eclectic and confessional shoegaze, lo-fi indie and alt-pop. Their 2017 debut album, Psychopomp, reworked Zauner’s previous lo-fi releases and served as an intimate look at grief and dependency. Live, the combination of violin, saxophone and electric guitar brings a cinematic feel to the tracks from their 2021 Grammy-nominated album, Jubilee.
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), marks the band’s first proper studio release.
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.
