Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast spent years scratching out an existence on the lower rungs of the American indie circuit before belatedly achieving success during the pandemic. Yet, to her enduring bafflement, her route to the big time was not musical but literary, with her 2021 memoir about her mother’s death, Crying in H Mart, becoming a publishing sensation.
Life comes at you fast when you’re an overnight darling, and just two months after H Mart’s publication Zauner released her third Japanese Breakfast album, Jubilee, a rebounding reaction against the grief she felt for her mother that brimmed with renewed joy and possibility.
Yet that upswing proved short lived. As Zauner watched her profile climb and word circulated about an HBO adaptation of H Mart, she found it too much. Zauner, who uses Japanese Breakfast as an alter ego rather than a band name, had been an underdog all her life. To suddenly be the toast of the chattering classes – and with a Grammy nomination to boot – triggered a bout of impostor syndrome.
This manifested as crippling stomach pain that struck as she took Jubilee on the road. (The HBO series unravelled too.) “It was all stress and pressure and feeling like, I don’t deserve this,” she told New York magazine recently. “People are going to find out that I am an awful singer.”
Overnight acclaim, she discovered, could be even more wearying than slow-burning obscurity. The Oregon-raised artist’s solution was to step away from music and temporarily relocate to her mother’s native Korea, where she sought to switch off the voice in her head telling her she wasn’t good enough.
That retreat from the glare of semi-fame has proved a wise strategy as Zauner returns with her gorgeously wrought fourth Japanese Breakfast album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women). The title is a wry nod to the internet cliche of Zauner as one of indie’s stereotypical “sad girls” – a fellow traveller of Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski. (In the United States, journalists have also pitched her as a sort of artisanal Chappell Roan.)
It is a resplendent celebration of contrasts, moving gracefully between emotion-shredding ballads and hazy indie rock-outs, the latter steeped in her love for shoegaze and goth. The album even turns properly bonkers at one point when the actor Jeff Bridges, channelling his Big Lebowski alter ego, pops up for a country duet inspired by Zauner’s childhood love of the Kenny Rogers song Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.
The Dude has gone indie, and what sense it makes. (The actor and songwriter were put in contact by Zauner’s producer Blake Mills, a sometime guitarist of Bob Dylan who previously worked with Bridges on a 2011 solo LP.)
Melancholy Girls starts with the slimline ballad Here Is Someone, which pairs a descending line of plaintive zither-like notes with her hazy, expressive voice. The track hits like a cousin once removed of a superior Billie Eilish torch song before going retro kitsch with a flourish of flutes that wouldn’t feel out of place on a 1970s meditation tape.
It also addresses one of the LP’s themes, which is that time is forever racing away and that, run as we might, we can never catch up (“quietly dreaming of slower days ... Can you see our love will leave us behind?”).
“At this time in my life and the way that I think about melancholy, it’s very intertwined with time and the passage of it,” Zauner elaborated recently. “And this desire to get ahead of it and to keep it at bay – and the sort of melancholic reality that it’s forever passing. I think of it not so much as like a violent sadness or longing or heartbreak, but kind of this pensive, anticipatory grief about the passage of time.”
Mournful turns to plaintive on the acoustic Orlando in Love, a homespun dirge bulked out with strings. But a wonderfully fragile collection truly achieves lift-off with Honey Water, an exquisite chugger that references the shoegaze stalwarts My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. Zauner has set the controls for the heart of the indie disco.
Japanese Breakfast stays on that trajectory for most of what follows. Mega Circuit has an agreeable alt-country swing and bleak lyrics (she refers mysteriously to “incel eunuchs”). Leda is a blessed-out, largely instrumental piece that recalls Zauner’s atmospheric soundtrack for the Sable video game.
In general she is determined to put clear daylight between the new project and the more commercial Jubilee. A rare exception is Picture Windows, which matches Zauner’s sugar-sweet voice with a melodic drone and comforting guitar jangle.
Then comes the curveball as Bridges, possibly wearing nothing but his dressing gown, rocks up for Men in Bars, an eccentric cherry atop a solid reiteration of alternative rock’s core values of melody and vulnerability coexisting in beautiful equilibrium.
