Inside the Lush Sadness of Japanese Breakfast
Image Courtesy: Jim Bennett
Michelle Zauner has long made sadness feel like glitter. But on For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), her fourth studio album released March 21, the frontwoman of Japanese Breakfast veers into murkier terrain. Produced by Blake Mills, the record swaps pop exuberance for something more haunted: moody guitar textures, dissonant chords, and literary references straight out of gothic tradition. What unfolds is a ten-track meditation on grief, femininity, and the beautiful chaos of desire.
From the opening track, “Here Is Someone,” it’s clear Zauner is writing more than just songs. Each track drips with artistic innovation, blurring the lines between literature, myth, and memory. “Orlando in Love,” lifted from Matteo Maria Boiardo’s 15th-century poem, pulls listeners into the mind of a poet seduced by a siren. “Leda” reimagines the myth of Leda and the Swan through a contemporary lens, drawing power from classical subtext to explore violation and control. The thematic scope is vast but intentional, anchored in Zauner’s lifelong interrogation of loss and womanhood.
Visually, the album builds its own decadent cosmos. The cover art—Zauner slumped over a banquet table, surrounded by wilting flowers and half-eaten fruit—recalls the 17th-century Dutch vanitas paintings, those oil paintings obsessed with death and indulgence. That tension between rot and ritual plays out across the music videos and tour visuals. In the self-directed “Orlando in Love” video, she stumbles onto a beach, where a siren-like Venus emerges from the sea. It’s ominous: desire dressed as doom. She later embodies a Renaissance poet, dressed in tights and a feathered hat, lost in a candlelit haze. It’s theatrical but still somehow tender, the kind of intimate grandeur Zauner displays her strength.
Image Courtesy: Michelle Zauner
The album’s standout moment is “Men in Bars,” a slow-burning duet with actor Jeff Bridges. Their voices tangle like old flames still burning as one or strangers on their last call. “I never knew I’d find my way into the arms of men in bars,” Zauner sings before Bridges responds with gravel-worn warmth. It’s an unexpected collaboration that immerses the listener. Like much of the album, the song lingers in the ache—drawn out by pedal steel guitar and that distinctly lonesome twang of country ballads. The verses move slowly, and there are quiet pauses between lyrics, with the weight of desire hanging in suspension.
This pivot toward an eerie introspection marks a stark departure from Jubilee, the buoyant 2021 record Zauner once called “bombastic, full of strings and horns.” That album was a victory lap: loud, celebratory, and defiantly optimistic. For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) draws the curtain closed. It’s quieter, more cerebral, and intentionally harder to swallow. Critics have called it “a winkingly adventurous album” and “wistful but sharp.” Both descriptions speak to the album’s balance—how it wades into deep emotional waters, threading moments of dark humor and self-awareness through the sadness.
Image Courtesy: Tonje Thilesen
Still, her evolution tracks. From the raw grief of Psychopomp—written while caring for her terminally ill mother—to the starry-eyed detachment of Soft Sounds from Another Planet, her discography has always centered on transformation. With Jubilee, she questions and explores what joy could sound like. Now, she’s asking what comes after. “I have naturally always been a grossly oversharing type of person,” Zauner told Interview Magazine. “I also felt this sense of urgency because when I was going through all this, I kept thinking that no one warned me this is what happens.” That urgency pulses through the album, as some kind of emotional reportage. She’s documenting what it means to survive the aftermath of happiness, to sit in a space where everything has already happened and nothing can be undone.
Early live performances of the album are already resonating. One fan called the record “efficient and emotionally tight” on Reddit, praising that its 32-minute runtime “has no skips.” Another compared her songwriting to Jeff Tweedy’s—layered and deceptively simple. Even without Jubilee’s glossy hooks, Zauner hasn’t lost her grip on emotional gravity.
With For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), Japanese Breakfast isn’t chasing radio play or TikTok virality. She’s leaning into something more enduring: an aesthetic that luxuriates in discomfort, that finds beauty in the eerie and elegance in the aftermath. It may not be a technicolor burst, but it’s a flickering candle in a dim cathedral, a brilliant next chapter.
Strike Out,
Writer: Salette Cambra
Editor: Emily Montarroyos
Graphic Designer: Carly Collins
Tallahassee