Isn’t it a little fun, sometimes, to be sad? On her fourth studio album as Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), Michelle Zauner luxuriates in the aesthetics of the titular emotion. Plush beds of strings recall days spent wallowing between the sheets—presumably silk—while sweeping references to Leda, Icarus, and Venus evoke heartache and yearning of mythological proportions. In the self-directed music video for the romantic lead single, “Orlando in Love,” Zauner dons a hat and tights to play the buccaneering Renaissance poet she sings about. The misty, candlelit vignette is a fitting introduction to a record on which Zauner drapes her sadness around her like a costume.
This is not to accuse Zauner of inauthenticity, but rather to say that this record is a winkingly adventurous one. Zauner’s previous albums were each their own form of intimate emotional archaeology: She traced grief and heartache on her lo-fi debut, Psychopomp, and burst with ebullient, synth-dappled joy on her closest thing to a pop record, Jubilee, in 2021. Alongside Jubilee, Zauner also published the hugely successful Crying in H Mart, a tender and devastating memoir about the death of her mother and her relationship with her Korean heritage. After the latter album and book propelled her to new levels of attention, Zauner described feeling as though she were “sitting at a poker table and… just winning hand after hand and [being] so afraid of losing the entire time.” Her intense tour schedule led to health anxiety and stress-induced illnesses, undercutting the public career highs with private lows. It’s perhaps no surprise that, despite being best known for her autobiographical work, on this release she turns her lens outwards, roaming through fictional landscapes and examining the performances and perils of fame itself.
For Melancholy Brunettes is Zauner’s fourth full-length release, but also, in a way, her first studio album: While previous albums were recorded in makeshift DIY spaces, this one benefitted from the use of bonafide recording studios and the input of renowned producer Blake Mills (Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius). The difference in Zauner’s sound is palpable, from the very moment the opening ballad “Here Is Someone” glitters to life with spectral strings and segues into the slow march of “Orlando.” Despite its orchestral, Romantic (with a capital R) beginnings, the record quickly turns toward the sepia soundscapes of country music, its melancholia taking shape as metallic guitar twangs and rolling percussion.
At just half an hour, this is a slight album, despite moments of heart-bursting ambition that at times leave you wishing for more to sink your teeth into. The spare ballad “Little Girl” trickles past pleasantly like a bubbling stream, as does “Men in Bars,” a plaintive duet with Jeff Bridges. The album’s more propulsive moments are its most impressive: “Mega Circuit” is a grunge-y, mud-slinging take on the Andrew Tate-ification of young men with woozy slide guitar and jaunty piano, its sinister shuffle bringing to life the ways in which sadness can metastasize into vitriol and hatred. “Honey Water,” a rollicking rock song told from the embittered perspective of the wife of a serial cheater, glides its way into the most cathartic of psychedelic breakdowns, dazzling in its rage.
The scene-stealer is “Picture Window,” a tale of love and its necessary companion, loss. The song’s double-edged hook—“All of my ghosts are real,” Zauner intones cheerfully over a dark, insistent guitar thrum—is one of her most extravagantly melancholic moments. But just on the other side of it, the instrumentation coils tightly, leaving her voice bare and exposed as she sings of the pre-emptive terror of imagining the death of someone you love more than life itself. Even at her most theatrical, Zauner’s songwriting crackles with these electric moments of intimacy, pulling you close enough to see the tears drying in the stage make-up.
