Japanese Breakfast’s New Album Is ‘For Melancholy Brunettes’

For years, many Japanese Breakfast fans were only familiar with the band’s music fronted by singer Michelle Zauner, and in 2021, Zauner invited readers in to her most personal moments in her New York Times bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart, released just a few weeks before Japanese Breakfast’s third album Jubilee. With those two experiences now in the rearview mirror, Zauner has been able to spend the last few years focusing again on music, culminating in the new Japanese Breakfast album For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women), out today.

While Jubilee struck a more uplifting tone compared to past albums, For Melancholy Brunettes returns to some of the band’s moodier origins. The album’s title comes from John Cheever’s short story “The Chimera,” which ended up also inspiring the lead single “Orlando In Love.”

“[’The Chimera’ is] about a man who’s unhappy in his marriage and is fantasizing about all the different women he wants to sleep with, and some of them are melancholy brunettes and some are sad women. I just thought that combination of words was quite funny, and sort of filed it away and ended up using it in the song ‘Orlando In Love,” Zauner told Stereogum. “I found it to be sort of romantic and tongue-in-cheek, and it had ‘melancholy’ in the title which I think is really the kind of thematic throughline through the album.”

Reflecting on the past few years since the release of Jubilee and Crying in H Mart that inspired the album, Zauner said the new album was informed by a sense of fatigue from her work.

“For me, in this record, I was thinking a lot about how much my work life had really consumed me over the past several years,” Zauner told NPR. “And I think at the end of the Jubilee cycle, I was really reckoning with how I had kind of disrupted a balance in my life and needed to kind of get back on track to live a happier life.”

Zauner confessed that her hustle picked up after her mother’s death in 2014. “I think especially after my mother passed away, I’ve felt like I’ve just been running through life trying to do everything I can because I’m so much more aware of how short it is,” she said. She ended up spending last year living in Seoul, growing a stronger connection to her familial home where she was born. “There’s a kind of melancholy in looking out at these unlived lives. But it’s not a violent longing, it’s just kind of a melancholic acceptance.”