Japanese Breakfast announces new album For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
Michelle Zauner has announced the release of her fourth album on Dead Oceans.
Due March 21st, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) takes its title from a line in the lead single ‘Orlando in Love’, an string-assisted acoustic-grounded track, with pretty production.
It was produced by Blake Mills – who has worked with Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple at the famous Sound City studio in Los Angeles.
It’s the first album since 2021’s Jubilee, and the release of her can’t-recommend-highly-enough memoir Crying In H Mart – one of the best music-related books in recent years.
With success, Zauner “felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” she says. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realised if I kept going I was going to die.”
As such, the story of Icarus, and the folly of ambition is theme for the record.
Lead single ‘Orlando in Love’ a reference to John Cheever’s short story In the World of Apples, based on Orlando Innamorato by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo. In Zauner’s version, 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.
For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) tracklisting:
- Here is Someone
- Orlando in Love
- Honey Water
- Mega Circuit
- Little Girl
- Leda
- Picture Window
- Men in Bars (feat. Jeff Bridges)
- Winter in LA
- Magic Mountain
More about the record:
Though Zauner has experimented with science fiction on Soft Sounds from Another Planet and buoyant surrealism on Jubilee, the landscape of European Romanticism that underpins For Melancholy Brunettes and the dense tissue of classical allusion that comes with it marks new territory for a songwriter entering her artistic maturity. She credits a range of antecedents with inspiration. The forlorn café girl in Degas’ “L’absinthe”. The seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich. The passionate longing and wild, undulating moors in Wuthering Heights. Hans Castorp wrapped in his camel hair blanket, dreaming on the Berghof balcony. It is an atmosphere made palpable by the intricate, interlocking guitar arrangements that accompany much of the record, lapping like waves over the meter, often as oblique in their expression of the chord as Zauner can be in her polyvalence of feeling and insight.
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.
The Japanese Breakfast tour dates
Apr 12 & 19 – Indio, CA @ Coachella Music and Arts Festival
Apr 23 – Austin, TX @ Moody Theater (ACL Live) *
Apr 24 – Dallas, TX @ South Side Ballroom *
Apr 26 – Atlanta, GA @ Tabernacle *
Apr 27 – Charlotte, NC @ The Fillmore *
Apr 28 – Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium *
May 2 – Chicago, IL @ Salt Shed *
May 3 – Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore *
May 5 – Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall *
May 7 – Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway *
May 9 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount *
May 16 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Met Philadelphia Presented by Highmark *
Jun 21 – Milwaukee, WI @ Summerfest
Jun 24 – Oslo, NO @ Rockefeller
Jun 25 – Stockholm, SE @ Filadelfia
Jun 26 – Copenhagen, DK @ VEGA
Jun 29 – Manchester, UK @ Academy 1
Jun 30 – Glasgow, UK @ Barrowland
Jul 3 – London, UK @ O2 Academy Brixton
Jul 4-6 – Ewijk, NL @ Down The Rabbit Hole 2025
Jul 8 – Paris, FR @ Le Trianon
July 10-12 – Bilbao, ES @ Bilbao BBK Live
Aug 23 – Santa Barbara, CA @ Santa Barbara Bowl *
Aug 28 – San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic *
Aug 30 – Bend, OR @ Hayden Homes Amphitheater *
Sep 1 – Vancouver, BC @ Orpheum Theater *
Sep 6 – Denver, CO @ The Mission Ballroom *
Sep 9 – St Paul, MN @ The Palace Theater *
- w/ Ginger Root
