Japanese Breakfast

After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts, Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, "For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)," marks the band’s first proper studio release. Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills — an innovator of uncommon subtlety, known for his work with everyone from Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple and quietly regarded as many a legacy artist’s favorite guitar player — and tracked at the venerable Sound City in Los Angeles — birthplace of "After The Gold Rush," "Fleetwood Mac" and "Nevermind" among other classics — 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.”

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For all the record owes to the romantic imagination, the sensibility of Japanese Breakfast is too thoroughly contemporary to lapse into pastiche. Tracks like “Mega Circuit,” a ferocious minor key shuffle in which we are introduced to a gang of loitering incels, and “Winter in LA,” a tongue in cheek take on the edenic California of the Laurel Canyon era, could only have been written in our time. And for as often as Zauner assumes fictional, often male, often insidious personas on "For Melancholy Brunettes," her own subjectivity cannot help but surface. “All of my ghosts are real,” she sings on “Picture Window,” a song that manifests the fear of loving someone so much you presage their loss. It is an anxiety rendered gut wrenchingly acute when one considers Zauner’s own history of grief, the loss of her mother having been a major theme of Japanese Breakfast’s work since "Psychopomp" and one which persists here albeit faintly, as unsuspected echoes of an irredeemable sadness.

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. Mann’s book is about a hapless young man, Hans Castorp, who checks in for a brief visit to a tuberculosis sanatorium and finds himself unable to leave for a period of seven years. Zauner reimagines herself as Hans and her artistic body of work as the mountain looming over her. It became a personal song, she says, “about confronting the narcissism that goes into being an artist and deciding I didn't want it to destroy my potential for having a happy life.” For her, making any work feels like scaling a mountain, but from the perch of "For Melancholy Brunettes," she surveys the future. “Bury me beside you,” she sings to her beloved, “In the shadow of my mountain.”