Michelle Zauner conjures a transcendent pop majesty on her poetic and finely rendered fourth album with her band
Japanese Breakfast, 2025's
For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women). The album arrives in the wake of the tidal wave of success
Zauner experienced in 2021 with her memoir Crying in H Mart about working through her mother's death from cancer and reconnecting with her Korean heritage. That same year,
Japanese Breakfast also released
Jubilee, which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Album. Needing to process all she had been through,
Zauner took a year off in 2023. She moved to her birthplace of Seoul, South Korea, ostensibly to begin work on her second book, but also to connect more directly with the food and culture that inspired her. The hiatus proved transformative and she eventually found her way back to music. Working with producer
Blake Mills,
Zauner has crafted an album that works as a darkly intoxicating contrast to the bright pop of
Jubilee.
Japanese Breakfast has always drawn upon a mix of '80s influences, but here
Zauner and the band conjure a dark, goth-like magic, evoking the full-masted galleon productions of bands like
the Church,
Japan, and
the Cure. Her songs reveal themselves slowly; her voice a cherubic bell-tone cutting through the coastal fog of analog orchestral synths, crystalline acoustic guitars, and gargantuan basslines. Yet there are moments of lyrical twang, as on "Men in Bars," her sun-dappled duet with a gruff-voiced
Jeff Bridges, or "Winter in L.A." which sparkles with a
Beach Boys wistfulness. There's a densely literate feeling to the album, one most obviously represented in the title, which is a reference to a
John Cheever short story. There's also the shimmering atmospheric lead single "Orlando," which borrows inspiration from 15th century Italian Renaissance writer
Matteo Maria Boiardo's epic poem "Orlando Innamorato." Impressively,
Zauner's songs luxuriate in feelings of romantic longing and sexual folly much in the same way
Cheever and
Boiardo do in their writing. Grande literary tropes aside, there's a sense that
Zauner is reflecting on her relationships and questioning not only the other person's actions, but her own. On "Honey Water," she sings, "Why can't you be faithful?/Why won't you believe?/They say only love can change a man, but all that changes is me." She explicitly underlines her feelings of dissonance on "Winter in L.A.," revealing "I wish you had a happier woman...someone who loves the sun." It often feels like
Zauner is questioning herself, staring into a mirror and wondering whether she is the sad girl who avoids the sun, or the ideal woman, like the "Venus from the shell" who emerges from the sea to bedevil a man in "Orlando." For
Zauner and
Japanese Breakfast, the answer is always something in between and more complex and creatively assured than what has come before. With
For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women),
Zauner invites us into the magic mirror of her life and pulls us through to the other side. ~ Matt Collar
