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JAPANESE BREAKFAST

Japanese Breakfast

For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)

    Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills, 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 2x 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. On 'Orlando in Love' — a riff on John Cheever’s riff on Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo — the hero is a well meaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to a siren’s call, his 69th canto (even in the lofty realm of classical myth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo). 'Honey Water' plumbs the quiet rage of a woman married to an unfaithful man, watching him cede again and again to lust like a base insect perpetuating its own demise.

    Sadness is indeed 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, they sound most saliently on its final song, 'Magic Mountain', an engagement with Thomas Mann’s famous novel of the same name. For her, making any work feels like scaling a mountain, but from the perch of 'For Melancholy Brunettes', she surveys the future.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Here Is Someone
    2. Orlando In Love
    3. Honey Water
    4. Mega Circuit
    5. Little Girl
    6. Leda
    7. Picture Window
    8. Men In Bars
    9. Winter In LA
    10. Magic Mountain

    On ‘Psychopomp’, the debut full length for Japanese Breakfast, Michelle Zauner romanticizes need, knowing precisely how futile it can be, as she howls on the record’s final song, to “cling to your sleeves ‘til they’re like lacerated sails.”

    ‘Psychopomp’ unspools with an otherworldly rush - it’s skysized dream-pop with substance, moving from the gorgeous euphoric rush of ‘In Heaven’ through the pinwheeling ‘Rugged Country’ and ‘Everybody Wants To Love You’ into the painful longing of ‘Jane Cum’ and ‘Heft’ and the relief of ‘Triple 7’.

    Imagine Bat For Lashes or ‘Tango In The Night’-era Christine McVie working in the New York indie-pop scene populated by the likes of Frankie Cosmos and Porches.

    ‘Psychopomp’ has become one of the year’s most beloved indie-pop records, receiving plaudits from the likes of Pitchfork and NPR.

    TRACK LISTING

    1 In Heaven
    2 The Woman That Loves You
    3 Rugged Country
    4 Everybody Wants To Love You
    5 Psychopomp
    6 Jane Cum
    7 Heft
    8 Moon On The Bath
    9 Triple 7

    Japanese Breakfast

    Sable - OST

      Sony Music Masterworks announces the vinyl release of Sable (Original Video Game Soundtrack), featuring instrumental and vocal music written by Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner for the globally acclaimed, open-world video game. The critically celebrated soundtrack is now being released as a stunning double coloured vinyl (purple/pink). Japanese Breakfast is an indie rock band, in which Michelle Zauner is lead singer. This wasn’t Zauner’s first video game contribution of 2021: for the trailer to the new Sims 4 expansion pack Cottage Living, the singer, musician, director and bestselling author recorded a new version of her song “Be Sweet” in Simlish, the fictional language featured in the Sims games.

      Drawing from her years of songwriting experience, Sable finds Zauner making new explorations into ambient and experimental music, the resulting soundtrack as breathtaking and otherworldly as the game itself. Sable had been hotly anticipated after being teased at E3 2018. The game is a unique and unforgettable journey accompanying guide Sable through her Gliding; a rite of passage that will take her across vast deserts and mesmerizing landscapes, capped by the remains of spaceships and ancient wonders.

      Of the soundtrack, Zauner says, “It was important to me that each biome in this world felt unique. I used woodwinds and vocal layering to make monumental ruins feel ancient and unknown, industrial samples and soft synths to make atomic ships feel cold and metallic, classical guitar and bright piano to make encampments feel cozy and familiar. I wanted the main themes to recall iconic works of Joe Hisaishi and Alan Menken, to fill the listener with the childlike wonder of someone on the precipice of a grand discovery."



      Japanese Breakfast

      Jubilee

        From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.

        Jubilee finds Michelle Zauner embracing ambition and, with it, her boldest ideas and songs yet. Inspired by records like Bjork’s Homogenic, Zauner delivers bigness throughout -- big ideas, big textures, colors, sounds and feelings. At a time when virtually everything feels extreme, Jubilee sets its sights on maximal joy, imagination, and exhilaration.

        It is, in Michelle Zauner’s words, “a record about fighting to feel. I wanted to re-experience the pure, unadulterated joy of creation…The songs are about recalling the optimism of youth and applying it to adulthood. They’re about making difficult choices, fighting ignominious impulses and honoring commitments, confronting the constant struggle we have with ourselves to be better people.”

        Throughout Jubilee, Zauner pours her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution—these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it.

        STAFF COMMENTS

        Barry says: Japanese Breakfast has an uncanny knack to sit right at the intersection of so many genres, while simultaneously defying them all. 'Jubilee' comes across as a celebration, taking the tried and tested sounds of synthpop and soul and fusing them with a wealth of influence from all over the musical spectrum, resulting in a gloriously well produced and uncannily uplifting end product.

        TRACK LISTING

        1. Paprika
        2. Be Sweet
        3. Kokomo, IN
        4. Slide Tackle
        5. Posing In Bondage
        6. Sit
        7. Savage Good Boy
        8. In Hell
        9. Tactics
        10. Posing For Cars


        Japanese Breakfast

        Soft Sounds From Another Planet

          Japanese Breakfast’s ‘Soft Sounds From Another Planet’ is less of a concept album about space exploration so much as it is a mood board come to life.

          Over the course of 12 tracks, Michelle Zauner explores a sonic landscape of her own design, one that’s big enough to contain her influences. There are songs on this album that recall the pathos of Roy Orbison’s ballads, while others could soundtrack a cinematic drive down one of ‘Blade Runner’s endless skyways.

          Zauner’s voice is capacious; one moment she’s serenading the past, the next she’s robotically narrating a love story over sleek monochrome, her lyrics more pointed and personal than ever before.

          While ‘Psychopomp’ was a genre-spanning introduction to Japanese Breakfast, this visionary second album launches the project to new heights.

          TRACK LISTING

          Diving Woman
          Road Head
          Machinist
          Planetary Ambience
          Soft Sounds From Another Planet
          Boyish
          12 Steps
          Jimmy Fallon Big
          Body Is A Blade
          Till Death
          This House
          Here Come The Tubular Bells


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