Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner is no stranger to sadness, but the quality that makes her stick out in the indie-pop landscape more than most is that you can never, ever guess exactly what she’s going to do with it. Her 2016 lo-fi debut, Psychopomp, was an intimate exploration of grief and the heartbreak of loss, while its follow-up, 2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet, was a sci-fi-inspired synth-pop existential examination of the complexities of our relationships to others. She followed both with 2021’s Jubilee, the bouncy, swirling indie-pop hit-machine that — along with the release of Zauner’s bestselling memoir about her relationship to her late mother and her Korean identity, Crying in H Mart — helped launch Zauner into the pop culture limelight. Even through Jubilee’s joyful ebullience, a kind of pensive sorrow often runs in and out of Zauner’s compositions. But as Jubilee straightforwardly attempted to remind us, Zauner understands that sadness in art is merely a useful tool to help elucidate some of life’s most complicated and convoluted emotional experiences.
While its moves are similarly as unpredictable as the rest of her catalog, her newest album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), playfully investigates that sadness through literary and mythical references, European Romanticism, a keen understanding of music history and compositional development, and, of course, some of Zauner’s most personal and political musings. Released four years after Zauner’s status in our culture changed entirely, this is the first of Zauner’s albums to be recorded at a professional-grade recording studio — the legendary Sound City in Los Angeles — and produced by the incredibly talented (and legendary in his own right) Blake Mills. The album not only sees Zauner trying to process this cataclysmic shift in her artistic life but also has her ruminating on some of the most pertinent issues plaguing our society currently — the past’s place in the present and the increasing radicalization and dejection of chronically online young men.
Opener “Here is Someone” sets the tone with a whimsical, bell-piano led composition that takes us directly into Zauner’s soft, assured vocals as she sings, seemingly to her bandmates, “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 track burns slowly but leads into a fuzzy orchestra of acoustic guitars, strings, flutes, and bells that seem to nod at the California folk-rock flourishes made popular by some of Sound City’s earliest clientele. The equally eccentric “Orlando in Love” follows before the album takes the first of its genre-bending turns on “Honey Water,” a riotous electric-guitar-led rock song with sweeping psychedelic bridges told from the perspective of the heartbroken partner of a serial adulterer. In it, Zauner sings “The lure of honey water draws you from my arms so needy / You follow in colonies to sip it from the bank / In rapturous sweet temptation, you wade in past the edge and sink in / Insatiable for a nectar, drinking ’til your heart expires” as if it could be a metaphor for anyone turning their back on someone they love to pursue almost anything that promises to quench their thirst for a little while.
On what is likely to be the album’s biggest conversation starter, “Mega Circuit,” the genre turns again to a two-beat shuffle and grungy alt-country rhythm led by booming drums, lilting slide guitar, and a perky piano melody. The song’s somewhat sordid composition aligns directly with Zauner’s considerations on the track — a meditation on the ways young men’s sadnesses are exploited by “incel eunuchs” in our culture to breed more discord and hatred in their ranks. Zauner sings from the viewpoint of a person watching this happen to someone they love: “Well, I better write my baby a shuffle good / Or he’s gonna make me suffer the way I should / Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded / Carrying dull prayers of old men cutting holier truths.”
“Little Girl” returns to the earlier softness of the album but builds off the emotional core of “Mega Circuit,” this time turning Zauner’s attention to the potential feelings of her estranged father. Written as a direct plea from a father who no longer speaks to the daughter he’s addressing, Zauner sings “Seven years of running at a breakneck speed / Convalescing cheaply far abroad / Dreaming of a daughter who won’t speak to me” in airy vocals reminiscent of Soft Sounds’s “Til Death” over gently churning acoustic guitars and crystalline synths. On “Leda,” Zauner turns her eyes toward the mythic as mellow strings swell around the springy plucking of an acoustic guitar. Although she sings of the games female Greek gods played on mortal men, the references to Leda — and her subsequent rape by Zeus in the form of a swan — connect thematically to what this part of the album’s been reflecting on: the power and violence men sometimes enact on the people they claim to love.
For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
The album’s brand of country shuffle comes back again on “Picture Window,” where the pedal steel guitar and a pulsating, driving drumbeat that reminds me of The Wallflowers’ perennial banger “One Headlight” take the backseat to some of Zauner’s loudest and most ornate vocals on the whole record. Unlike some of the previous tracks, “Picture Window” takes its aim inward at Zauner’s biggest fears and anxieties, singing on the refrain “ Are you not afraid of every waking minute / That your life could pass you by?” before arriving at the truly melancholic chorus “But all of my ghosts are real / All of my ghosts are real / All of my ghosts are my home.” Although the track’s focus is on how much loss is involved in loving, the lyrics and the upbeat composition work to remind us that while the anxiety of losing the ones we love the most is as real as anything else, we still have an obligation to live our lives inside the “picture,” not as watchers outside of it.
As the final three tracks on the album begin on the album, you can see some of those earlier nods to mid-century Los Angeles coming back in full force. The balladic “Islands in the Stream”-inspired duet, “Men in Bars,” features vocals by the actor Jeff Bridges and is a reimagining of an older Zauner song from her Covid-era project Bumper. This time, the situation Zauner’s speaker sang about in “Honey Water” is flipped on its head, focusing on the unfaithfulness of a woman and her heartbroken male partner. “Winter in LA” has the 1960s pop swagger of a Gold Star Studios produced track that not only feels like a callback to the legendary ground the band is treading on in the creation of this album but also to Soft Sounds again, only this time to the album’s track “Boyish.” On it, she sings of wishing she could be a better partner — “I wish you had a happier woman / One that could leave the house / Someone who loves the sun / Loves everyone” — while invoking over and over what Los Angeles was best known for: the sunshine, even in the dead of winter. The final track, “Magic Mountain,” is perhaps the most Romantic (and romantic) on the album and helps bring the album’s themes full circle. Directly referencing Thomas Mann’s famous bildungsroman The Magic Mountain, Zauner’s speaker sings over luxurious strings and a steady acoustic guitar: “Once the fever subsides / I’ll return to the flatlands / A new man.” Here, Zauner reminds us again of the transformative power of sadness and makes a case for embracing it instead of running away from it. At the end of the track, Zauner’s speaker sings, “You and me, and soon ours / Bury me beside you in the shadow of my mountain” bowing to a sense of hopefulness among the pain of everything else.
While Zauner has always been adventurous, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) might be her most daring record to date. Rarely does sadness sound this big, instrumentally, on an album with the kind of indie-pop, alt-country, folk-rock twists this one has, and even more rarely do we get an album so clear in its purpose. There is not a single second on this album where Zauner strays from exposing the ways sadness can be used as a tool for personal metamorphosis — whether positive or negative — and the lucidity of this theme is apparent before you even get to the halfway point of the record. Despite its title tilting toward softness, For Melancholy Brunettes is a rapturously lush album meant to be played loud as hell and listened to very carefully.
