Japanese Breakfast – For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)

Label: Dead Oceans
Released: 21st March 2025

Melancholy can come in waves, or it can be a pervasive all-encompassing presence that inflects everything. For Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, melancholy and channelling that sense of sadness into creative magic is the spirit that informs her stunning fourth album ‘For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad Women)’. 

Befitting the first Japanese Breakfast album recorded in a proper studio, the sound is a gorgeous tapestry of instruments woven together with Zauner’s deeply melodic and heart-stopping songs. There are moments that are epic in scale, like the powerful crescendo to ‘Honey Water’, while opening track ‘Here Is Someone’ and gorgeous closer ‘Magic Mountain’ have an ornate and twinkling, dreamy magical quality. 

Sadness is imbued throughout the record, but it’s a luxurious, comforting kind of sadness. Zauner’s songs are rich and intricately detailed both musically and lyrically, with songs full of evocative imagery, character building and a kind of forlorn romanticism. ‘Men In Bars’, a stately, quietly haunting duet with Jeff Bridges, is a ballad that starkly illuminates the depth of her writing. 

This is an album a world away from bedroom experimentalism and idle dreaming. It’s the work of someone who has seen a lot and experienced a lot and is pouring it all into their art. Every fine detail and every measured sound is refined and perfectly in place.

There’s little of the euphoria and wide-eyed wonder of the last Japanese Breakfast album, ‘Jubilee’; what we have instead is something that resonates on deeper levels. A dreamy escapist paradise to reflect, to cry, to laugh, to dream. It’s the sound of a supremely gifted songwriter lifting every facet of her craft to a new level.