Japanese Breakfast – For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) (2025) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Japanese Breakfast – For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) (2025)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 32:22 minutes | 537 MB | Genre: Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Dead Oceans

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, the record sees frontwoman 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.” The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album’s characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. On “Orlando in Love” — a riff on John Cheever’s riff on Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo — 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 (even in the lofty realm of classical myth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo). “Honey Water” plumbs the quiet rage of a woman married to an unfaithful man, watching him cede again and again to lust like a base insect perpetuating its own demise. 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. For her, making any work feels like scaling a mountain, but from the perch of For Melancholy Brunettes, she surveys the future.While Japanese Breakfast’s 2021 breakthrough Jubilee was the result of a deliberate attempt by frontwoman Michelle Zauner to create more upbeat music, her latest album clues the listener in with its title: this might be a bit of a downer affair. It’s not overly a bummer, though, and is in fact her strongest work to date. Lyrically, it delves into the perils of lust (“He’s gonna make me suffer the way I should”), while sonically it’s richly melodic. At its best, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) evokes a collaboration between Court and Spark-era Joni Mitchell and Vespertine-era Björk.

For Melancholy Brunettes is the indie pop act’s fourth full-length but the first made in a proper studio. (Blake Mills produces.) This is immediately apparent, with the gorgeous, cascading, seemingly wrapped-in-faerie-light “Here Is Someone,” which blends warm electronics with acoustic string pluckings—as well as flutes and vibes (the instrument) and whisper-sung vocals—all in the highest of fidelities. These are sounds you wouldn’t even attempt if you didn’t have multi-tracked digital capabilities at hand.

It’s never been more clear that Zauner, whose 2021 memoir Crying in H Mart was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, is one of our strongest songwriters. There is a lot of diversity at play, although it’s not one of those records that sounds like a mixtape or a series of genre exercises. “Men in Bars”—a murder ballad featuring vocals from no other than Jeff Bridges—is a more-than-credible drinking song fueled by pedal steel. The subdued shoegaze of the infidelity ballad “Honey Water” could blare from any crowded bar in the world, while the Pet Sounds-ish “Winter in LA” bursts forth from a gloomy start to delight in string-backed harmony and full-throated vocalizing. Our main hope is that it’s fewer than four years until their next record. – Mike McGonigal

Tracklist:

1-1. Japanese Breakfast – Here is Someone (03:08)
1-2. Japanese Breakfast – Orlando in Love (02:25)
1-3. Japanese Breakfast – Honey Water (04:50)
1-4. Japanese Breakfast – Mega Circuit (03:04)
1-5. Japanese Breakfast – Little Girl (03:40)
1-6. Japanese Breakfast – Leda (03:18)
1-7. Japanese Breakfast – Picture Window (02:58)
1-8. Japanese Breakfast – Men in Bars (feat. Jeff Bridges) (02:48)
1-9. Japanese Breakfast – Winter in LA (02:58)
1-10. Japanese Breakfast – Magic Mountain (03:08)

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